Finding a tinnitus clinical trial

Search the registry

• All tinnitus trials currently recruiting →

  The broadest view. Start here, then narrow.

• Recruiting, and near you →

  Add your location on the results page — most tinnitus trials require in-person visits.

• Interventional trials only →

  Excludes observational studies, which do not test a treatment.

• Everything, including completed studies →

  Useful for finding results from a trial you read about, not for joining one.

ClinicalTrials.gov is run by the US National Library of Medicine and lists studies from around the world, not only US ones. National registries also exist — the EU Clinical Trials Register, ISRCTN in the UK, ANZCTR in Australia and New Zealand — and are worth checking if the registry above shows nothing near you.

How to read a listing

Six fields decide almost everything about what a trial can tell you, and they are all stated plainly in every registered listing.

Recruitment status

Whether the study is actually enrolling right now.

“Not yet recruiting” and “active, not recruiting” both mean you cannot join today. This is the first thing to check and the most common reason a promising listing turns out to be a dead end.

Study type and design

Interventional or observational; randomised or single-arm; blinded or open-label.

A single-arm study where everyone receives the treatment cannot tell you whether the treatment works — only what happened to the people who took it. Tinnitus improves on its own often enough that this distinction decides how much the eventual result will mean.

Control condition

Placebo, sham device, active comparator, waiting list, or none.

Sham control matters enormously in tinnitus, because using any device with attention from a clinician tends to help. A trial comparing a device against a waiting list is measuring something much weaker than one comparing it against an identical device that does nothing.

Primary outcome measure

Usually a questionnaire: Tinnitus Handicap Inventory (THI), Tinnitus Functional Index (TFI), or Tinnitus Questionnaire (TQ).

These measure distress and interference, not loudness. A trial with a THI primary outcome is asking whether tinnitus bothers you less — not whether it got quieter. Both are worth studying; they are not the same claim.

Eligibility criteria

Age, tinnitus duration, severity threshold, hearing loss limits, exclusions.

Most tinnitus trials require a minimum severity score, and many exclude pulsatile or objective tinnitus, recent onset, or specific hearing thresholds. Reading this first saves a phone call.

Sponsor and funder

Who is running and paying for it.

A manufacturer-funded trial of that manufacturer's device is not disqualifying — much of the best device evidence is industry-funded — but it is worth knowing, and it is stated plainly in the listing.

The distinction that matters most in tinnitus research

Almost every tinnitus trial measures distress, not loudness. THI, TFI and TQ are all questionnaires about how much tinnitus interferes with your life. A trial can produce a clearly positive result on one of those while the sound itself is unchanged — and that is a real, useful result, because distress is what most people actually want reduced.

It becomes a problem only when the finding is later described as though the treatment made tinnitus quieter. When you read a headline about a tinnitus breakthrough, the primary outcome measure in the registry entry will usually tell you which claim the study can actually support. The same distinction runs through our treatment comparison, which is filterable by what each treatment targets for exactly this reason.

Common questions