The majority of people aren’t proactive about their hearing health and likely haven’t had a hearing test since grade school because it’s generally not part of a routine adult physical. Fortunately, a professional hearing specialist can discover a wealth of information from a hearing examination which can be used to both identify any hearing loss and help evaluate whether utilizing treatments like hearing aids is effective.
You may not get a lollipop after your full audiometry test, which is more involved than you might recall from your childhood, but you will get a deeper understanding of your hearing health. Here are three of the most prevalent kinds of hearing tests and what they’ll tell you.
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 think of as pitch, is another key component. It’s measured in Hertz (no relation to the car rental company), with a low bass sound measuring around 50-60 Hz, and normal speech ranging from 500 to 3,000 Hz. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the spectrum of frequencies that a healthy human ear is able to hear.
With a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you don a set of headphones which are connected 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. Much like that familiar hearing test from your youth, you push a button or raise your hand when a tone sounds either in your left ear or your right ear.
We’ll monitor the minimum volume necessary for you to hear each sound. In other words, this test gauges how well your ears function: What range of sound you have a hard time hearing (which can be an integral 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 tracks your ability to hear words being spoken. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken while there is background noise. In other situations, the person 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 help you, and because they are only speaking single words, you won’t have any context to help you. Words that rhyme, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be challenging for individuals dealing with high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Rather than only looking at the volume or threshold needed 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
Alright, these can be a bit 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. Your hearing specialist will have a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum functions, which can indicate whether there’s a possible issue like impacted earwax or a perforation.
Your ears have reflexes that are checked by a similar probe. When you hear a loud sound, muscles in your middle ear involuntarily contract. Knowing the noise level needed for this reflex can help a hearing specialist determine the extent of hearing loss. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have extreme hearing loss.
It’s important to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when problems happen in the little bones inside of the ears and can occur at the same time as age-related or noise-induced hearing loss.
If you’re having a hard time hearing, call us and schedule a hearing test! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help inform you on how to preserve healthy hearing, and what your potential treatment options might be.