The majority of individuals aren’t proactive about their hearing health and probably haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s normally not part of a routine adult physical. Fortunately, a professional hearing specialist can uncover 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.
You may not get a lollipop after your full audiometry test, which is more involved than you might remember from your childhood, but you will get a greater 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 factor that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is calculated in decibels (dB). Another important aspect is pitch or tone which measures the frequency of sound. It’s measured in Hertz (no relation to the car rental company), with a low bass sound measuring about 50-60 Hz, and normal speech ranging from 500 to 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 connected to an audiometer. You may also wear a device called a bone oscillator which sounds alarming 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 lowest volume necessary for you to hear each sound. In other words, this test gauges how well your ears are working: 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’re experiencing hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This type of test evaluates your ability to accurately hear speech, 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. In other cases, the individual performing 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 rely on context to comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker’s mouth stops you from lip reading (something you may not even realize you’ve been doing). For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, words that rhyme, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are hard to differentiate.
Rather than just focusing on the volume or threshold required for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry tracks 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 identify.
Immittance audiometry
Okay, these can be a bit 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 have a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum functions, which can identify whether there’s a potential issue like impacted earwax or a perforation.
A related test makes use of a similar probe as an auditory tap on the knee, yes, your ears have reflexes! When you hear a loud noise, muscles in your middle ear involuntarily contract. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to determine the severity of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise required to trigger this reflex. People with profound hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.
It’s essential to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when problems happen in the little bones inside of the ears and can occur at the same time as age-related or noise-related hearing loss.
Are you having difficulty hearing? Get it tested! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help inform you on how to maintain healthy hearing, and what your potential treatment options may be.
