Most individuals aren’t proactive about the health of their hearing and likely haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s typically not part of a routine adult physical. Luckily, a professional hearing specialist can uncover a wealth of information from a hearing examination which can be used to both diagnose any hearing loss and help assess whether utilizing treatments like hearing aids is effective.
A complete 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 completed, but you’ll obtain a much clearer understanding of your hearing. Here are three of the most common types of hearing tests and what they’ll reveal.
Pure tone testing
One factor 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 assesses 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. 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 may use is known as a bone oscillator which just measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. 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.
We’ll track the lowest volume necessary for you to hear each sound. In other words, this test gauges how well your ears are working: What range of sound you have difficulty hearing (which can be an integral 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 kind of test evaluates your ability to accurately hear speech, again with sounds being played through headphones. Your hearing specialist will sometimes ask you to repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background sound. Your hearing specialist will, in other instances, have you repeat words they are saying, but their mouths will be hidden from view.
Because you can’t see the speaker’s lips, you won’t get any visual cues to help 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 difficult for people suffering from 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 certain 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 kind of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it might be a little 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 shows how well your eardrum is working, which can indicate whether there’s a possible problem like impacted earwax or a perforation.
A related test uses a similar probe as an auditory tap on the knee, yes, your ears have reflexes! When you hear a loud sound, muscles in your middle ear involuntarily 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. Individuals with profound hearing loss don’t exhibit any reflex.
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 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 difficulty hearing? Get it tested! We can help you better comprehend your hearing health, inform 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.