If you haven’t had a hearing exam since you were in grade school, you’re not alone, it’s often not part of a routine adult physical, and, regrettably, we tend to treat hearing reactively instead of proactively. The good news: Hearing exams are simple, painless, and provide a wealth of insight to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing problems and assessing whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
You may not get a lollipop after your complete audiometry test, which is more involved than you probably remember from your childhood, but you will get a deeper understanding of your hearing health. Here are three of the most prevalent types of hearing tests and what they’ll reveal.
Pure tone testing
One component that we utilize to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is calculated in decibels (dB). Another important factor is pitch or tone which assesses the frequency of sound. At the lower end of the tone spectrum, a low bass sound clocks in between 50 and 60 Hertz (Hertz, or Hz for short, is the unit of measurement related to tone or pitch), with normal speech ranging between 500 and 3,000 Hz. Healthy human hearing ranges from 20 to 20,000 Hz.
With pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones attached to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist may use is called a bone oscillator which just measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. A lot like that familiar hearing test from your youth, you push 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 tracked. In other words, this test assesses how well your ears function: 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 are experiencing hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This test also makes use of headphones, but instead evaluates your ability to hear speech. 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 keeps you from reading lips (something you might not even realize you’ve been doing). For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are hard to distinguish.
Speech audiometry tracks your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing as opposed to tone testing which measures how loud specific sounds have to be in order to be heard. Whether hearing aids will be helpful is another thing that word recognition testing can help determine.
Immittance audiometry
Alright, these can be a little uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a small inserted probe. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum functions, which can identify whether there’s a possible issue such as impacted earwax or a perforation.
A related test uses 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 automatically contract. Identifying the noise level required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist measure the extent of hearing loss. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have extreme hearing loss.
It’s essential to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when problems occur in the little bones inside of the ears and can happen at the same time as age-related or noise-related 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.