If you haven’t had your hearing tested since your grade school days, you’re not the only one, it’s often not part of a regular adult physical, and, unfortunately, we tend to treat hearing reactively rather than 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 utilizing treatments like hearing aids is effective.
A full audiometry test is more involved than what you may recall 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 prevalent types of hearing tests and what they’ll tell you.
Pure tone testing
We typically think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels only express the loudness of a sound. Tone, what we colloquially think of as pitch, is another key factor. It’s measured in Hertz (no relation to the car rental company), with a low bass sound measuring about 50-60 Hz, and general 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 pair of headphones which are connected to an audiometer. You may also wear a device called a bone oscillator which seems alarming but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. Pure tones are delivered to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pressing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.
We’ll monitor 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 trouble hearing, and generally how well your ears are working, will be gauged by this test.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test evaluates your ability to accurately hear spoken words, again with sounds coming at you through headphones. In some circumstances, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken while there is background noise. In other cases, the individual carrying out the test will say words to you, but there’s a surprise, 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 keeps you from lip reading (something you might not even realize you’ve been doing). For individuals who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are difficult to distinguish.
Instead of only looking at the volume or threshold needed for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry measures 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
This type of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it might be a little uncomfortable. In tympanometry, a small probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially alter your ear’s pressure. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that shows how well your eardrum is working, which can identify whether there’s a possible issue such as impacted earwax or a perforation.
Your ears have reflexes that are checked by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear automatically contract when you are exposed to loud noise. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to determine the extent of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise required to trigger this reflex. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have profound hearing loss.
Though immittance tests are most helpful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, problems with the eardrum and/or little bones inside the ear, because these can happen at the same time as age- or noise-related hearing loss, it’s essential to include to know everything that’s happening with your ears.
If you’re having difficulty hearing, contact us and schedule a hearing test! We can help you better comprehend your hearing health, educate 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.