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 regular adult physical, and, regrettably, we tend to treat hearing reactively rather than proactively. Luckily, 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 determine whether using treatments like hearing aids is effective.
A complete audiometry test is more involved than what you might remember 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. Here are three of the most common types of hearing tests and what they’ll tell you.
Pure tone testing
We normally think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels just express the loudness of a sound. Another important aspect is pitch or tone which assesses the frequency of sound. At the lower end of the tone spectrum, a low bass sound measures between 50 and 60 Hertz (Hertz, or Hz for short, is the unit of measurement associated with tone or pitch), with average speech ranging between 500 and 3,000 Hz. Healthy human hearing ranges from 20 to 20,000 Hz.
For pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones connected to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist may use is known as 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.
We’ll monitor the minimum volume required for you to hear each sound. In other words, this test assesses how well your ears function: What range of sound you have difficulty 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 kind of test measures your ability to accurately hear spoken words, 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 noise. Your hearing specialist will, in other instances, have you repeat words they are saying, but their mouths will be hidden from view.
Because you are unable to see the speaker’s mouth, you won’t get any visual cues to assist you, and because they are only speaking single words, you won’t have any context to fall back on. For individuals who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, words that rhyme, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are hard to distinguish.
Rather than only looking at the volume or threshold needed for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry evaluates 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
This type of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it may be a bit uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a little inserted probe. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum functions, which can indicate whether there’s a possible issue such as impacted earwax or a perforation.
Your ears have reflexes that are tested 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 determine the severity of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise required to trigger this reflex. Individuals with extreme hearing loss don’t exhibit any reflex.
It’s important 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 trouble hearing? Get it tested! We can help you better understand 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.
