Do tinnitus sufferers live in quieter daily sound environments to other people?

New research from the University of Connecticut, USA suggests that people suffering from tinnitus may have quieter lifestyles to other groups. Published in the journal Scientific Reports, the experiment used wearable tech - rather than self-reporting - to study the daily sound levels of people with self-reported tinnitus relative to a control group. Converging evidence was found from a dataset of 108 adults aged 18 to 80 years to suggest that people with tinnitus lead quieter lives, even when controlling for group differences in gender, age, and hearing thresholds. The authors were struck by their findings, given the large extent to which the literature links tinnitus to noise exposure. "One possible interpretation of our results is that people are isolating themselves because of their tinnitus, leading them to lead...