If you haven’t had your hearing tested since you were in grade school, you’re not alone, it’s often not part of a routine adult physical, and, unfortunately, we tend to treat hearing reactively rather than proactively. Luckily, a professional hearing specialist can discover a wealth of information from a hearing examination which can be used to both diagnose any hearing loss and help evaluate whether using treatments like hearing aids is effective.
A full audiometry test is more involved than what you might recall from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s completed, but you’ll obtain a much clearer understanding of your hearing. There are three prevalent kinds of hearing tests, each of which will supply different perspectives about your hearing.
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 assesses the frequency of sound. It’s calculated in Hertz (no relation to the car rental company), with a low bass sound measuring around 50-60 Hz, and general speech ranging from 500 to 3,000 Hz. Healthy human hearing ranges from 20 to 20,000 Hz.
With pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones attached to an audiometer. You may also use 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 push a button or raise your hand when a tone plays either in your left ear or your right ear.
We’ll track the minimum volume required for you to hear each sound. Whether your hearing loss is more marked on one side than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most difficulty hearing, and generally how well your ears are working, will be gauged by this test.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test measures your ability to accurately hear speech, again with sounds being played 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 depend on context to comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker stops you from reading lips (something you might 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 hard to distinguish.
Instead of only focusing on the volume or threshold needed for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry evaluates your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Word recognition testing can also assist in assessing whether hearing aids may help.
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. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum is working, which can identify whether there’s a possible problem such as impacted earwax or a perforation.
Your ears have reflexes that are tested by a similar probe. When you hear a loud noise, muscles in your middle ear involuntarily contract. Knowing the noise level needed for this reflex can help a hearing specialist determine the extent of hearing loss. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have extreme hearing loss.
It’s important to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when problems occur in the little bones inside of the ears and can happen at the same time as age-related or noise-related hearing loss.
Are you having trouble hearing? Get it tested! We can help you better understand your hearing health, inform you on what you can do to preserve healthy hearing, and let you know what your treatment options are if you have hearing loss or tinnitus.