Most people aren’t proactive about the health of their hearing and likely haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s typically 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 assess whether utilizing 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 obtain a much more detailed understanding of your hearing. There are three common kinds of hearing tests, each of which will supply different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
We usually think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels just express the loudness of a sound. Another important aspect 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 associated with tone or pitch), with average speech ranging between 500 and 3,000 Hz. Healthy human hearing ranges from 20 to 20,000 Hz.
For pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones connected to an audiometer. You might also wear a device called a bone oscillator which sounds 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 plays either in your left ear or your right ear.
We’ll monitor the lowest volume required for you to hear each sound. In other words, this test assesses how well your ears are working: What range of sound you have problems hearing (which can be a key indicator of whether you’d benefit from hearing aids), and whether you are suffering from hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This test also uses headphones, but instead tracks your ability to hear speech. Your hearing specialist will sometimes have you repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background sound. In other cases, the person carrying out the test will speak words to you, but there’s a catch, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
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 may not even recognize you’ve been doing). For individuals who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are hard to distinguish.
Rather than just focusing on the volume or threshold needed for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Word recognition testing can also assist in determining whether hearing aids could help.
Immittance audiometry
This type of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it may be a bit uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure inside of 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 indicate whether there’s a possible issue like impacted earwax or a perforation.
Your ears have reflexes that are checked by a similar probe. When you hear a loud sound, muscles in your middle ear automatically contract. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to identify the severity of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise required to trigger this reflex. Individuals with extreme hearing loss don’t exhibit any reflex.
It’s important to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when issues occur in the small bones inside of the ears and can happen at the same time as age-related or noise-induced hearing loss.
Are you having difficulty hearing? Get it tested! We can help you better comprehend your hearing health, inform 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.