If you haven’t had a hearing exam since you were in grade school, you’re not the only one, it’s usually not part of a routine adult physical, and, regrettably, we tend to treat hearing reactively rather than proactively. Fortunately, a professional hearing specialist can discover 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 full audiometry test is more involved than what you might 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 reveal.
Pure tone testing
One factor that we utilize to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is calculated in decibels (dB). Tone, what we colloquially refer to as pitch, is another key component. 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 pair of headphones which are hooked up to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist might 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 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 monitored. In other words, this test gauges how well your ears are working: What range of sound you have a hard time hearing (which can be a key indicator of whether you’d benefit from hearing aids), and whether you are experiencing hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This type of test measures your ability to accurately hear speech, again with sounds being played through headphones. Your hearing specialist will sometimes have you repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background sound. In other situations, the person performing 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 understand what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker keeps you from lip reading (something you may not even know you’ve been doing). Rhyming words, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be hard for people dealing with high-frequency hearing loss to differentiate.
Speech audiometry tracks 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. 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 bit uncomfortable. 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 indicate whether there’s a potential issue like 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. 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 small bones inside the ear, because these can happen at the same time as age- or noise-related hearing loss, it’s important to include to recognize everything that’s happening with your ears.
Are you having trouble hearing? Get it tested! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help educate you on how to maintain healthy hearing, and what your potential treatment options might be.