If you haven’t had your hearing tested since you were in grade school, you’re not the only one, it’s often not part of a regular adult physical, and, regrettably, we tend to treat hearing reactively instead of proactively. Fortunately, a professional hearing specialist can uncover a wealth of information from a hearing examination which can be used to both diagnose any hearing loss and help evaluate whether using treatments like hearing aids is effective.
You may not get a lollipop after your complete audiometry test, which is more involved than you might remember from your childhood, but you will get a deeper 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
One component that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is measured in decibels (dB). Another important factor is pitch or tone which assesses the frequency of sound. 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 don a set of headphones which are hooked up to an audiometer. You may also wear a device called a bone oscillator which sounds scary but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. Pure tones are delivered 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 marked in one ear than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most difficulty hearing, and generally how well your ears are functioning, will be measured by this test.
Speech audiometry
This type of test tracks your ability to accurately hear spoken words, again with sounds coming at you through headphones. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken while there is background noise. 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 rely on context to comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker’s mouth stops you from lip reading (something you may not even know you’ve been doing). For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, words that rhyme, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are challenging to distinguish.
Speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which calculates 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 identify.
Immittance audiometry
This type of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it may be a little uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially changes the pressure within your ear by pushing air in with a small inserted probe. Your hearing specialist will have a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum functions, which can identify whether there’s a potential problem such as impacted earwax or a perforation.
A related test makes use of a similar probe as an auditory tap on the knee, yes, your ears have reflexes! Muscles in your ear automatically contract when you are exposed to loud sound. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to identify the severity of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise needed to trigger this reflex. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have extreme hearing loss.
Though immittance tests are most useful 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.
Are you having trouble hearing? Get it tested! We can help you better comprehend your hearing health, educate you on what you can do to preserve healthy hearing, and let you know what your treatment options are if you have hearing loss or tinnitus.