The majority of individuals aren’t proactive about their hearing health and likely haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s generally 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 identify any hearing loss and help assess 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 deeper understanding of the health of your hearing. Here are three of the most prevalent types of hearing tests and what they’ll reveal.
Pure tone testing
One component that we utilize to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is calculated in decibels (dB). Tone, what we conversationally refer to as pitch, is another key factor. At the lower end of the tone 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 normal 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 set of headphones which are hooked up to an audiometer. You may also use a device called a bone oscillator which seems scary but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. 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.
We’ll track the lowest volume required for you to hear each sound. In other words, this test gauges how well your ears are working: What range of sound you have problems hearing (which can be an essential indicator of whether you’d benefit from hearing aids), and whether you are experiencing 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 coming at you through headphones. In some circumstances, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken while there is background noise. In other situations, the person performing the test will say words to you, but there’s a surprise, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Because you are unable to see the speaker’s mouth, you won’t get 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 dealing with high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Rather than simply focusing on the volume or threshold required for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry tracks your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Whether hearing aids will be helpful is another thing that word recognition testing can help determine.
Immittance audiometry
Okay, these can be a little 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. 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.
A related test uses 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 noise. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to determine the severity of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise needed to trigger this reflex. People with profound hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.
Though immittance tests are most helpful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, issues 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 essential to include to recognize everything that’s happening with your ears.
If you’re having difficulty hearing, give us a call and schedule a hearing test! We can help you better understand your hearing health, educate 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.
