Tickling your ears can actually be beneficial for the heart, a new study by researchers from the University of Leeds finds.
There are many ways to improve the health of your heart. The simplest of them is tickling your ears. A new study by researchers from the University of Leeds found that stimulating nerves in the ears by tickling can significantly improve the health of a person's heart. For the study, researchers used a standard TENS machine to apply electrical pulses to the small raised flap at the front of the ear immediately in front of the ear canal. Researchers found that this action reduced nervous signals that can be dangerous to the heart, especially failing ones.
"You feel a bit of a tickling sensation in your ear when the TENS machine is on, but it is painless," lead author Professor Jim Deuchars said in a press statement. "It is early days -- so far we have been testing this on healthy subjects -- but we think it does have potential to improve the health of the heart and might even become part of the treatment for heart failure."
About 34 healthy people took part in the study. The electrodes were applied to their ears for 15 minutes. During this time, researchers monitored the variability in their heartbeats and the activity of the part of the nervous system that drives the heart.
"The first positive effect we observed was increased variability in subjects' heartbeats. A healthy heart does not beat like a metronome," study researcher Dr. Jennifer Clancy said. "It is continually interacting with its environment -- getting a little bit faster or a bit slower depending on the demands on it. An unhealthy heart is more like a machine constantly banging out the same beat. We found that when you stimulate this nerve you get about a 20 percent increase in heart rate variability."
"We measured the nerve activity directly and found that it reduced by about 50% when we stimulated the ear," she continued. "This is important because if you have heart disease or heart failure, you tend to have increased sympathetic activity. This drives your heart to work hard, constricts your arteries and causes damage. A lot of treatments for heart failure try to stop that sympathetic activity -- beta-blockers, for instance, block the action of the hormones that implement these signals. Using the TENS, we saw a reduction of the nervous activity itself."
Explaining the mechanism, the researchers said that this technique stimulated a major nerve called the vagus. The electrical current that was sent down the nerves influenced outflows from the brain, which helped regulate the heart. Such stimulations have also been linked to treating conditions like epilepsy in the past.
Further studies need to be conducted to better understand how big and how lasting the residual effect on the heart is and whether this can help patients with heart problems.
Findings were published online in the journal Brain Stimulation. The project was self-funded.
