If you haven’t had your hearing tested since you were in grade school, you’re not the only one, it’s often 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 test which can be used to both identify any hearing loss and help assess whether using treatments like hearing aids is effective.
A full audiometry test is more involved than what you might remember from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s completed, but you’ll obtain a much more detailed understanding 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 factor is pitch or tone which measures the frequency of sound. It’s measured in Hertz (no relation to the car rental company), with a low bass sound measuring around 50-60 Hz, and general speech ranging from 500 to 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. 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. Pure tones are directed to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pushing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.
The minimum volume that you can hear the tones will then be monitored. Whether your hearing loss is more marked in one ear 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 tracks 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 sound. In other situations, the person carrying out 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 depend on context to comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker’s mouth stops you from reading lips (something you may not even recognize you’ve been doing). Rhyming words, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be hard for individuals dealing with high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which calculates how loud specific sounds need to be in order to be heard. Whether hearing aids will be helpful is another thing that word recognition testing can help determine.
Immittance audiometry
Okay, these can be a bit uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a little inserted probe. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that shows how well your eardrum is working, which can indicate whether there’s a possible problem such as 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 automatically contract. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to determine the extent of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise needed to trigger this reflex. People with extreme hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.
It’s essential to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when issues happen in the small bones inside of the ears and can happen at the same time as age-related or noise-induced hearing loss.
If you’re having difficulty 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 may be.