The majority of individuals aren’t proactive about the health of their hearing and likely haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s usually not part of a routine adult physical. The good news: Hearing exams are easy, painless, and supply a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing problems and determining whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
You may not get a lollipop after your complete audiometry test, which is more involved than you might 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 tell you.
Pure tone testing
We usually think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels only express the intensity of a sound. Tone, what we conversationally think of as pitch, is another key component. It’s calculated 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. Healthy human hearing ranges from 20 to 20,000 Hz.
With a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you don a pair of headphones which are connected to an audiometer. You might also use a device called a bone oscillator which seems alarming 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 minimum volume necessary for you to hear each sound. In other words, this test assesses how well your ears function: 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 suffering from hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This type of test measures your ability to accurately hear spoken words, again with sounds being played through headphones. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken along with background noise. Your hearing specialist will, in other instances, have you repeat words they are saying, but their mouths will be hidden from view.
Hearing individual words means you can’t rely on context to understand what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker’s mouth stops you from reading lips (something you might 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 hard to differentiate.
Speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing as opposed to tone testing which calculates how loud certain sounds have to be in order to be heard. Word recognition testing can also aid in determining whether hearing aids might help.
Immittance audiometry
This kind of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it might be a bit uncomfortable. In tympanometry, a small probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially alter your ear’s pressure. 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 working.
Your ears have reflexes that are checked by a similar probe. When you hear a loud sound, muscles in your middle ear involuntarily contract. Identifying the noise level needed for this reflex can help a hearing specialist gauge the extent of hearing loss. There’s no reflex response in individuals 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 happen at the same time as age- or noise-related hearing loss, it’s important to include to recognize everything that’s happening with your ears.
If you’re having a hard time hearing, contact us and schedule a hearing test! 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.