Most people aren’t proactive about the health of their hearing and probably haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s normally not part of a routine adult physical. Fortunately, a professional hearing specialist can uncover a wealth of information from a hearing examination which can be used to both identify any hearing loss and help determine whether utilizing treatments like hearing aids is effective.
A complete 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 done, but you’ll gain a much more detailed understanding of your hearing. There are three common types of hearing tests, each of which will provide different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
We normally think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels just express the intensity of a sound. Another important factor is pitch or tone which measures the frequency of sound. It’s measured in Hertz (no relation to the car rental company), with a low bass sound measuring around 50-60 Hz, and normal speech ranging from 500 to 3,000 Hz. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the range 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 connected to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist might use is called 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 sounds 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 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 kind of test evaluates 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. In other situations, the person carrying out the test will speak 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 keeps you from lip reading (something you might not even know you’ve been doing). For individuals who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are challenging to differentiate.
Speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which measures how loud particular sounds have to be in order to be heard. Word recognition testing can also assist in assessing whether hearing aids may help.
Immittance audiometry
This type of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it may be a little uncomfortable. 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 automatically contract when you are exposed to loud noise. 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. Individuals with profound hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.
It’s essential to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when issues occur in the little 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! We can help you better understand 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.