Tinnitus can have a pervasive impact on a person's ability to sleep in bed , according to scientists from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. The researchers studied how loud workplace noise may affect the sleeping patterns of 298 male volunteers, by comparing participants who had workplace noise-related hearing loss with those who did not suffer from the complaint. The lead author of the study, Tsafnat Test, said: "The homogeneous study population exposed to identical harmful noise at the same workplace allowed us to compare sleep quality between similar groups differing only by hearing status." Publishing their findings in the journal Sleep, the team revealed that many hearing loss conditions gained at work can lead to restlessness, while over half of the participants with workplace-related hearing loss said they suspected they had tinnitus. The study concluded that tinnitus was the main reason explaining disjointed sleep. In many cases, volunteers were found not only to find it difficult to fall sleep in their single and double beds at night, but also woke up at various points throughout the evening. Some even admitted to falling asleep during the day because they were so excessively tired. The scientists investigated various elements of sleep, such as difficulty in falling asleep, snoring and excessive movement in the participants while they slept.
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