If you haven’t had a hearing exam since your grade school days, you’re not alone, it’s often not part of a regular adult physical, and, unfortunately, we tend to treat hearing reactively instead of proactively. The good news: Hearing tests are easy, painless, and provide a wealth of insight to professional hearing specialists, both for diagnosing hearing issues and determining whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
A full audiometry test is more involved than what you may remember from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s done, but you’ll obtain a much clearer understanding of your hearing. Here are three of the most common kinds of hearing tests and what they’ll tell you.
Pure tone testing
One component that we utilize to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is measured in decibels (dB). Another important aspect is pitch or tone which assesses the frequency of sound. It’s measured in Hertz (no relation to the car rental company), with a low bass sound measuring around 50-60 Hz, and normal 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 wear a device called a bone oscillator which seems scary but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. A lot 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 monitor the minimum volume required for you to hear each sound. In other words, this test assesses 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 suffering from hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This test also utilizes headphones, but instead tracks your ability to hear speech. Your hearing specialist will sometimes ask you to repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background noise. Your hearing specialist will, in other instances, 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 keeps you from lip reading (something you may not even recognize you’ve been doing). Words that rhyme, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be challenging 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 help in determining whether hearing aids could 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. A graph readout will permit your hearing specialist to determine if there’s an issue with your eardrum like earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is functioning.
Your ears have reflexes that are checked by a similar probe. When you hear a loud noise, muscles in your middle ear involuntarily contract. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to determine the extent of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise necessary to trigger this reflex. There’s no reflex response in people who have profound hearing loss.
It’s important to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when issues happen in the little bones inside of the ears and can happen at the same time as age-related or noise-induced hearing loss.
If you’re having a hard time hearing, give us a call and schedule a hearing test! 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.