If you haven’t had a hearing exam since your grade school days, you’re not alone, it’s usually not part of a regular adult physical, and, unfortunately, we tend to treat hearing reactively instead of proactively. Luckily, a professional hearing specialist can uncover a wealth of information from a hearing examination which can be used to both identify any hearing loss and help determine whether using treatments like hearing aids is effective.
You may not get a lollipop after your complete audiometry test, which is more involved than you might recall from your childhood, but you will get a greater understanding of the health of your hearing. Here are three of the most prevalent types of hearing tests and what they’ll tell you.
Pure tone testing
One component that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is calculated in decibels (dB). Another important aspect is pitch or tone which assesses the frequency of sound. At the lower end of the pitch spectrum, a low bass sound clocks in 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 attached to an audiometer. You may also use a device called a bone oscillator which sounds alarming but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. A lot like that familiar hearing test from your youth, you press a button or raise your hand when a tone sounds either in your left ear or your right ear.
The minimum volume that you can hear the tones will then be monitored. Whether your hearing loss is more pronounced in one ear than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most trouble hearing, and generally how well your ears are working, will be measured by this test.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test evaluates your ability to accurately hear speech, again with sounds being played through headphones. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken while there is background noise. Your hearing specialist will, in other circumstances, have you repeat words they are saying, but their mouths will be hidden from view.
Because you can’t see the speaker’s mouth, you won’t have any visual cues to assist you, and because they are only speaking single words, you won’t have any context to fall back on. Rhyming words, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be hard for people suffering from high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Instead of simply focusing on the volume or threshold needed for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry tracks your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Word recognition testing can also help in assessing whether hearing aids may help.
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. A graph readout will permit your hearing specialist to determine if there’s an issue with your eardrum such as earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is working.
Your ears have reflexes that are tested by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear automatically contract when you are exposed to loud sound. Knowing the noise level required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist measure the extent of hearing loss. There’s no reflex response in people who have extreme hearing loss.
Though immittance tests are most useful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, issues 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 essential to include to recognize everything that’s going on with your ears.
Are you having difficulty hearing? Get it tested! We can help you better understand your hearing health, educate 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.