If you haven’t had a hearing exam since you were in grade school, you’re not the only one, it’s often not part of a routine adult physical, and, unfortunately, we tend to treat hearing reactively instead of proactively. The good news: Hearing tests are easy, painless, and supply a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing problems and determining whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
A complete 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. There are three prevalent types of hearing tests, each of which will supply different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
We normally think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels just indicate the intensity of a sound. Another important factor is pitch or tone which measures the frequency of sound. 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 related to tone or pitch), with average speech ranging between 500 and 3,000 Hz. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the range of frequencies that a healthy human ear is able to hear.
With a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you don a set of headphones which are connected to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist may use is known as a bone oscillator which simply measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. 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 lowest volume that you can hear the tones will then be monitored. Whether your hearing loss is more marked on one side than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most difficulty hearing, and generally how well your ears are working, will be gauged by this test.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test measures your ability to accurately hear speech, again with sounds coming at you through headphones. Your hearing specialist will sometimes ask you to repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background noise. In other cases, the individual performing the test will speak words to you, but there’s a surprise, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Because you can’t see the speaker’s lips, 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. Words that rhyme, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be challenging for people suffering from high-frequency hearing loss to differentiate.
Rather than only focusing on the volume or threshold needed for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Word recognition testing can also aid in assessing whether hearing aids could 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 change your ear’s pressure. Your hearing specialist will get 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.
A related test utilizes a similar probe as an auditory tap on the knee, yes, your ears have reflexes! Muscles in your ear involuntarily 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. Individuals with extreme hearing loss don’t exhibit any reflex.
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 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.
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.
