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. Fortunately, a professional hearing specialist can discover a wealth of information from a hearing test which can be used to both diagnose any hearing loss and help evaluate 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 recall from your childhood, but you will get a greater 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). Another important factor is pitch or tone which measures the frequency of sound. At the lower end of the pitch 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 might use is known as a bone oscillator which simply measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. Pure tones are presented 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 tracked. In other words, this test assesses how well your ears are working: What range of sound you have difficulty hearing (which can be a key indicator of whether you’d benefit from hearing aids), and whether you are suffering from hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This test also utilizes headphones, but instead measures your ability to hear speech. In some circumstances, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken while there is background noise. In other cases, the individual carrying out 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 get any visual cues to assist you, and because they are only speaking single words, you won’t have any context to help you. For individuals who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are challenging to differentiate.
Rather than just looking at the volume or threshold required for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry measures 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 bit uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a small inserted probe. A graph readout will permit your hearing specialist to identify if there’s an issue with your eardrum like earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is functioning.
Your ears have reflexes that are checked by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear automatically contract when you are exposed to loud sound. 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. There’s no reflex response in people who have profound hearing loss.
Though immittance tests are most helpful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, problems with the eardrum and/or small 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 going on with your ears.
If you’re having difficulty hearing, call us and schedule a hearing test! We can help you better comprehend your hearing health, educate 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.