If you haven’t had a hearing exam since you were in grade school, you’re not alone, it’s usually not part of a routine 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 test which can be used to both identify any hearing loss and help determine whether using treatments like hearing aids is effective.
You might not get a lollipop after your complete audiometry test, which is more involved than you probably remember from your childhood, but you will get a greater understanding of your hearing health. There are three prevalent types of hearing tests, each of which will provide different perspectives about your hearing.
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. 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. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the spectrum of frequencies that a healthy human ear can hear.
With a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you put on a set of headphones which are hooked up to an audiometer. You may also use a device called a bone oscillator which sounds scary 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 plays either in your left ear or your right ear.
We’ll monitor the lowest volume necessary for you to hear each sound. In other words, this test gauges 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 type of test tracks your ability to accurately hear spoken words, again with sounds being played through headphones. In some circumstances, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken along with 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’s mouth stops you from reading lips (something you may not even know you’ve been doing). Words that rhyme, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be difficult for people dealing with high-frequency hearing loss to differentiate.
Instead of just focusing on the volume or threshold required for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry evaluates your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Word recognition testing can also assist in assessing whether hearing aids might help.
Immittance audiometry
Okay, these can be a bit uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. 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 have a graph readout that shows how well your eardrum is working, which can identify whether there’s a possible problem 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 identify 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 occur 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.
If you’re having a hard time hearing, call us and schedule a hearing test! We can help you better comprehend your hearing health, inform 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.