The majority of individuals aren’t proactive about their hearing health and probably haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s usually not part of a routine adult physical. The good news: Hearing tests are easy, painless, and provide a wealth of insight to professional hearing specialists, both for diagnosing hearing issues and assessing whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
A full audiometry test is more involved than what you may recall from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s completed, but you’ll obtain a much clearer understanding of your hearing. There are three common kinds of hearing tests, each of which will provide different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
One factor 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. At the lower end of the pitch 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. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the spectrum of frequencies that a healthy human ear can hear.
With a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you put on a set of headphones which are hooked up to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist may 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 press a button or raise your hand when a tone plays either in your left ear or your right ear.
We’ll monitor the lowest volume necessary for you to hear each sound. Whether your hearing loss is more marked in one ear than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most difficulty hearing, and generally how well your ears are working, will be measured by this test.
Speech audiometry
This test also utilizes headphones, but instead evaluates your ability to hear words being spoken. In some circumstances, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken along with background noise. In other situations, the person carrying out the test will say words to you, but there’s a surprise, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Hearing individual words means you can’t depend 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 realize you’ve been doing). Words that rhyme, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be challenging for individuals suffering from high-frequency hearing loss to differentiate.
Instead of just 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 identify.
Immittance audiometry
Okay, these can be a little uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. In tympanometry, a little probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially alter your ear’s pressure. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that shows how well your eardrum functions, which can identify whether there’s a potential 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! Muscles in your ear involuntarily contract when you are exposed to loud noise. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to determine the extent of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise required to trigger this reflex. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have profound 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 happen at the same time as age-related or noise-related hearing loss.
If you’re having difficulty hearing, call us and schedule a hearing test! We can help you better understand your hearing health, educate you on what you can do to maintain healthy hearing, and let you know what your treatment options are if you have hearing loss or tinnitus.
