If you haven’t had your hearing tested since your grade school days, you’re not the only one, it’s often not part of a routine adult physical, and, unfortunately, we tend to treat hearing reactively rather than proactively. The good news: Hearing exams are simple, painless, and supply a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for diagnosing hearing issues and determining whether treatments like hearing aids are working.
A complete 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. There are three prevalent types of hearing tests, each of which will supply different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
One factor 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 pitch 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 average speech ranging between 500 and 3,000 Hz. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the range of frequencies that a healthy human ear can hear.
With a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you put on a pair of headphones which are connected to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist might use is called a bone oscillator which simply measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. Much 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.
The lowest volume that you can hear the tones will then be monitored. In other words, this test gauges how well your ears function: What range of sound you have a hard time hearing (which can be a key 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 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 person carrying out the test will say words to you, but there’s a catch, 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 stops you from reading lips (something you may not even know you’ve been doing). For individuals who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are challenging to distinguish.
Instead of only focusing on the volume or threshold required for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry evaluates your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Word recognition testing can also help in determining whether hearing aids may help.
Immittance audiometry
Okay, these can be a bit uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. In tympanometry, a little probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially alter your ear’s pressure. Your hearing specialist will have a graph readout that shows how well your eardrum functions, which can indicate whether there’s a possible problem such as impacted earwax or a perforation.
Your ears have reflexes that are checked by a similar probe. When you hear a loud noise, muscles in your middle ear automatically contract. Knowing the noise level needed for this reflex can help a hearing specialist measure the extent of hearing loss. There’s no reflex response in people who have profound hearing loss.
Though immittance tests are most useful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, issues 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.
Are you having difficulty hearing? Get it tested! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help educate you on how to preserve healthy hearing, and what your possible treatment options may be.