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 regular adult physical, and, regrettably, we tend to treat hearing reactively rather than proactively. Fortunately, a professional hearing specialist can uncover a wealth of information from a hearing test which can be used to both diagnose any hearing loss and help evaluate whether utilizing treatments like hearing aids is effective.
You may not get a lollipop after your full audiometry test, which is more involved than you probably remember from your childhood, but you will get a deeper understanding of the health of your hearing. Here are three of the most common types of hearing tests and what they’ll reveal.
Pure tone testing
One factor 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. It’s calculated in Hertz (no relation to the car rental agency), 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 spectrum of frequencies that a healthy human ear is able to hear.
For pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones connected to an audiometer. You may also wear a device called a bone oscillator which sounds alarming but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. Pure tones are presented to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pressing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.
The lowest volume that you can hear the tones will then be monitored. Whether your hearing loss is more pronounced on one side 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 type of test measures your ability to accurately hear speech, again with sounds being played through headphones. Your hearing specialist will sometimes have you repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background sound. Your hearing specialist will, in other circumstances, have you repeat words they are saying, but their mouths will be hidden from view.
Hearing individual words means you can’t depend on context to understand what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker stops you from lip reading (something you may not even recognize you’ve been doing). For individuals who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, words that rhyme, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are hard to distinguish.
Rather than only looking at the volume or threshold needed for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry evaluates 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
This type of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it might be a bit uncomfortable. In tympanometry, a little probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially change your ear’s pressure. A graph readout will permit your hearing specialist to identify if there’s a problem with your eardrum like earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is functioning.
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 determine the extent of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise necessary to trigger this reflex. Individuals with extreme hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.
It’s important to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when problems occur in the small bones inside of the ears and can occur at the same time as age-related or noise-related 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 educate you on how to preserve healthy hearing, and what your potential treatment options might be.
