If you haven’t had a hearing exam since your grade school days, you’re not the only one, it’s often not part of a routine adult physical, and, regrettably, we tend to treat hearing reactively rather than proactively. Luckily, a professional hearing specialist can discover a wealth of information from a hearing test which can be used to both identify any hearing loss and help assess whether using treatments like hearing aids is effective.
You might not get a lollipop after your complete audiometry test, which is more involved than you probably remember from your childhood, but you will get a deeper understanding of your hearing health. Here are three of the most prevalent kinds of hearing tests and what they’ll tell you.
Pure tone testing
One component that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is measured in decibels (dB). Another important factor is pitch or tone which measures the frequency of sound. At the lower end of the tone spectrum, a low bass sound clocks in between 50 and 60 Hertz (Hertz, or Hz for short, is the unit of measurement associated with tone or pitch), with normal speech ranging between 500 and 3,000 Hz. Healthy human hearing ranges from 20 to 20,000 Hz.
With a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you put on a set of headphones which are hooked up to an audiometer. You might also wear a device called a bone oscillator which sounds scary but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. Much like that familiar hearing test from your youth, you press a button or raise your hand when a tone sounds either in your left ear or your right ear.
We’ll monitor the minimum volume required for you to hear each sound. In other words, this test gauges how well your ears function: What range of sound you have problems hearing (which can be an essential indicator of whether you’d benefit from hearing aids), and whether you are suffering from hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test evaluates your ability to accurately hear spoken words, again with sounds coming at you through headphones. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken along with background noise. Your hearing specialist will, in other circumstances, have you repeat words they are saying, but their mouths will be hidden from view.
Hearing individual words means you can’t rely on context to comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker stops you from lip reading (something you may not even recognize you’ve been doing). For individuals who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, words that rhyme, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are challenging to distinguish.
Rather than just focusing on the volume or threshold required for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Whether hearing aids will be helpful is another thing that word recognition testing can help determine.
Immittance audiometry
Alright, these can be a little uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. In tympanometry, a little probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially change your ear’s pressure. A graph readout will permit your hearing specialist to identify if there’s an issue with your eardrum such as earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is functioning.
Your ears have reflexes that are checked by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear involuntarily contract when you are exposed to loud sound. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to identify the extent of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise required to trigger this reflex. People with extreme hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.
Though immittance tests are most useful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, problems with the eardrum and/or small bones inside the ear, because these can occur at the same time as age- or noise-related hearing loss, it’s essential to include to know everything that’s going on with your ears.
Are you having difficulty hearing? Get it tested! We can help you better comprehend your hearing health, inform you on what you can do to maintain healthy hearing, and let you know what your treatment options are if you have hearing loss or tinnitus.