The majority of people aren’t proactive about their hearing health and likely haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s typically not part of a routine adult physical. 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 evaluate 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 completed, but you’ll gain 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
One factor that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is calculated in decibels (dB). Tone, what we conversationally think of as pitch, is another key factor. It’s measured in Hertz (no relation to the car rental agency), with a low bass sound measuring about 50-60 Hz, and normal speech ranging from 500 to 3,000 Hz. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the range of frequencies that a healthy human ear can hear.
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 use a device called a bone oscillator which seems 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.
The minimum volume that you can hear the tones will then be tracked. In other words, this test assesses how well your ears are working: What range of sound you have a hard time hearing (which can be an essential indicator of whether you’d benefit from hearing aids), and whether you are suffering from hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This test also uses headphones, but instead measures 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 understand 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). For individuals who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are difficult to differentiate.
Speech audiometry monitors your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing as opposed to tone testing which measures how loud particular sounds need to be in order to be heard. Word recognition testing can also help in assessing whether hearing aids may help.
Immittance audiometry
Okay, these can be a bit uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. Tympanometry artificially changes the pressure within your ear by pushing air in with a small inserted probe. Your hearing specialist will have a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum functions, which can indicate whether there’s a potential problem like impacted earwax or a perforation.
Your ears have reflexes that are tested by a similar probe. When you hear a loud sound, 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 necessary to trigger this reflex. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have profound hearing loss.
Though immittance tests are most useful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, problems with the eardrum and/or small bones inside the ear, because these can occur 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 a hard time hearing, contact us and schedule a hearing test! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help educate you on how to preserve healthy hearing, and what your potential treatment options might be.
