If you haven’t had a hearing exam since your grade school days, you’re not the only one, it’s usually not part of a regular adult physical, and, regrettably, we tend to treat hearing reactively instead of proactively. Fortunately, a professional hearing specialist can discover a wealth of information from a hearing test which can be used to both diagnose any hearing loss and help determine 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 recall from your childhood, but you will get a greater understanding of your hearing health. Here are three of the most prevalent types of hearing tests and what they’ll reveal.
Pure tone testing
One component that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is measured in decibels (dB). Tone, what we conversationally refer to as pitch, is another key component. At the lower end of the pitch spectrum, a low bass sound clocks in between 50 and 60 Hertz (Hertz, or Hz for short, is the unit of measurement related to tone or pitch), with average speech ranging between 500 and 3,000 Hz. Healthy human hearing ranges from 20 to 20,000 Hz.
With pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones connected to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist may use is called a bone oscillator which simply measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. A lot like that familiar hearing test from your youth, you press a button or raise your hand when a tone plays either in your left ear or your right ear.
The minimum volume that you can hear the tones will then be tracked. Whether your hearing loss is more pronounced in one ear than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most difficulty hearing, and generally how well your ears are functioning, will be gauged by this test.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test measures your ability to accurately hear speech, again with sounds coming at you through headphones. Your hearing specialist will sometimes ask you to repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background sound. In other situations, the person doing the test will say words to you, but there’s a catch, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Hearing individual words means you can’t depend 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 realize you’ve been doing). Words that rhyme, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be hard for individuals dealing with high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Rather than just focusing on the volume or threshold needed for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Word recognition testing can also aid in assessing whether hearing aids could help.
Immittance audiometry
Okay, these can be a bit uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure within your ear by pushing air in with a small inserted probe. A graph readout will allow your hearing specialist to determine if there’s a problem with your eardrum such as earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is functioning.
A related test uses a similar probe as an auditory tap on the knee, yes, your ears have reflexes! Muscles in your ear automatically contract when you are exposed to loud noise. Knowing the noise level needed for this reflex can help a hearing specialist measure the extent of hearing loss. Individuals with profound hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.
Though immittance tests are most helpful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, issues 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 important to include to recognize everything that’s going on with your ears.
Are you having difficulty hearing? Get it tested! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help inform you on how to preserve healthy hearing, and what your potential treatment options might be.