The 2011 meeting of the Tinnitus Research Initiative (TRI) was held in Buffalo, Niagara with over 200 participants from 26 countries in attendance. For those of you unfamiliar with the TRI, I would encourage you to check out their website (www.tinnitusresearch.org) to see the scope of tinnitus research that is being carried out worldwide.

The TRI is a foundation dedicated to improving quality of life for people with tinnitus and tinnitus-related disorders by supporting biomedical research into novel treatments. Historically tinnitus research has been conducted in a somewhat disjointed fashion where small research groups from a wide range of different disciplines, audiologists, medics, biologists, psychologists, physicists, conducted studies on tinnitus but might never have met, know of each other, or work together. This resulted in a real lack of synergy in tinnitus research in the past. The working ethos of the TRI is that collaboration across disciplines is essential for better understanding of tinnitus and for the development of effective treatments. The TRI meeting therefore is multidisciplinary and international, and since its foundation in 2006 is going from strength to strength.

The conference opened with an address from Richard Salvi (Buffalo, USA) who pointed out that, whereas only a few decades ago, a handful, if any, research articles on tinnitus were being published each year, we now see more in the region of 200 articles on tinnitus appearing every year, finally putting the study of tinnitus in line with other mainstream sciences. This is a very positive observation, a change that is long overdue, and is reflected in the progress in the understanding tinnitus that has been made in the last few years through neuroscientific research.

Presentations during the TRI conference demonstrated an impressive breadth of current research. To note a few, Carol Bauer (Illinois, USA) spoke about the possible involvement of the cerebellum in tinnitus, a brain structure more commonly associated with the control of movement. Ann Belén Elgoyhen (Buenos Aires, Argentina) spoke about the emerging field of network pharmacology and how this might apply to drug therapies for tinnitus, and Peter Tass (Jülich, Germany) presented the principles of their sound device for tinnitus treatment, with some promising results from a clinical trial in Germany involving 63 patients.

The meeting was equally divided according to clinical science or basic neuroscience, with some glimpses of crossover, such as the basic research of Michael Kilgard (Dallas, Texas) who presented on vagal nerve stimulation for tinnitus and how this research is translating into clinical research in humans. He showed us some early data from 5 human participants who are receiving a course of vagal nerve stimulation, with 3 of the 5 so far showing some benefit. It will be very interesting to watch how these early clinical trials progress.

A strong theme of this year’s meeting was the need for large scale studies of current treatments and the need to push novel ideas through more thorough testing. This was complemented by presentations of some new large scale studies that are in planning or have recently started. Craig Formby (Alabama, USA) presented the plan for a substantial trial of Tinnitus Retraining Therapy. This trial will involve 6 research sites across the US and include 228 participants. This is a phenomenal effort and will be of great value in determining future care for people with tinnitus.

Closer to home, as well as my own talk on recent work from our lab in Nottingham, Mike Mulheran from Leicester gave a very interesting talk on the effect of tinted light on the perception of tinnitus, and Amr El Refaie (Bristol) presented his recent Cochrane review of tinnitus masking. Poster presentations from Joel Berger (Nottingham) and William Sedley (Newcastle) completed the UK contingent. You can download details of all these presentations at www.tinnitusresearch.org. Next year the meeting comes to Europe and I hope we will again have a significant representation from the growing community of tinnitus researchers from the UK.