Most individuals aren’t proactive about the health of their hearing and probably 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 test which can be used to both diagnose any hearing loss and help determine whether using treatments like hearing aids is effective.
A full audiometry test is more involved than what you probably recall from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s completed, but you’ll gain a much clearer understanding of your hearing. Here are three of the most prevalent kinds of hearing tests and what they’ll reveal.
Pure tone testing
We typically think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels just express the intensity of a sound. Tone, what we conversationally refer to 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 general 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 pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones connected to an audiometer. You might also use a device called a bone oscillator which seems scary but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. 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.
The lowest volume that you can hear the tones will then be monitored. Whether your hearing loss is more marked on one side than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most trouble hearing, and generally how well your ears are working, will be gauged by this test.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test measures your ability to accurately hear speech, again with sounds being played through headphones. In some circumstances, 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.
Because you can’t see the speaker’s mouth, you won’t have any visual cues to assist you, and because they are only speaking single words, you won’t have any context to help you. For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are hard to differentiate.
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 assist in assessing whether hearing aids may help.
Immittance audiometry
This kind of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it may be a little uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially changes the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a small inserted probe. A graph readout will permit your hearing specialist to determine if there’s a problem with your eardrum like earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is working.
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. Knowing the noise level required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist determine the extent of hearing loss. Individuals with extreme hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.
Though immittance tests are most helpful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, problems with the eardrum and/or little bones inside the ear, because these can occur at the same time as age- or noise-related hearing loss, it’s essential to include to recognize everything that’s going on with your ears.
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 educate you on how to preserve healthy hearing, and what your possible treatment options might be.