The majority of individuals aren’t proactive about the health of their hearing and probably haven’t had a hearing test since grade school because it’s usually not part of a routine adult physical. Luckily, a professional hearing specialist can discover a wealth of information from a hearing test which can be used to both identify any hearing loss and help evaluate whether utilizing treatments like hearing aids is effective.
A complete audiometry test is more involved than what you probably remember from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s done, but you’ll gain a much more detailed understanding of your hearing. Here are three of the most prevalent types of hearing tests and what they’ll tell you.
Pure tone testing
One component that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is measured in decibels (dB). Tone, what we colloquially 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 about 50-60 Hz, and normal speech ranging from 500 to 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 don a pair of headphones which are connected to an audiometer. You may also use a device called a bone oscillator which sounds alarming but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. A lot like that familiar hearing test from your youth, you press a button or raise your hand when a tone plays 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 assesses how well your ears are working: What range of sound you have problems hearing (which can be an integral indicator of whether you’d benefit from hearing aids), and whether you’re 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. Your hearing specialist will sometimes have you repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background sound. In other situations, the person carrying out the test will speak words to you, but there’s a catch, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Because you can’t see the speaker’s lips, you won’t have any visual cues to help 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 challenging for people dealing with high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing as opposed to tone testing which calculates how loud certain sounds need to be in order to be heard. Word recognition testing can also help in assessing whether hearing aids might help.
Immittance audiometry
This type of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it might be a bit uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially changes the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a little inserted probe. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that shows how well your eardrum is working, which can identify whether there’s a potential issue such as impacted earwax or a perforation.
A related test makes use of 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 identify the severity of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise necessary to trigger this reflex. 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 issues occur in the little bones inside of the ears and can happen at the same time as age-related or noise-induced hearing loss.
If you’re having difficulty hearing, contact us and schedule a hearing test! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help inform you on how to maintain healthy hearing, and what your potential treatment options may be.