The majority of individuals aren’t proactive about the health of their hearing and likely haven’t had a hearing test since grade school because it’s normally not part of a routine adult physical. Fortunately, a professional hearing specialist can discover a wealth of information from a hearing examination which can be used to both diagnose any hearing loss and help assess whether utilizing treatments like hearing aids is effective.
A complete audiometry test is more involved than what you might 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. Here are three of the most prevalent kinds of hearing tests and what they’ll tell you.
Pure tone testing
We normally think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels only indicate the loudness of a sound. Tone, what we conversationally refer to as pitch, is another key factor. At the lower end of the tone spectrum, a low bass sound measures 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. Healthy human hearing ranges from 20 to 20,000 Hz.
With pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones attached to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist might use is known as a bone oscillator which just measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. Pure tones are directed to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pushing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.
The minimum volume that you can hear the tones will then be tracked. 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 gauged by this test.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test evaluates your ability to accurately hear spoken words, again with sounds being played through headphones. In some circumstances, 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.
Because you can’t see the speaker’s mouth, you won’t have any visual cues to help you, and because they are only speaking single words, you won’t have any context to fall back on. Words that rhyme, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be hard for individuals dealing with high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Rather than just looking at the volume or threshold required 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 kind of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it might be a bit uncomfortable. In tympanometry, a small probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially change your ear’s pressure. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum is working, which can identify whether there’s a possible 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! When you hear a loud noise, muscles in your middle ear automatically contract. Identifying the noise level required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist gauge the extent of hearing loss. Individuals with extreme hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.
Though immittance tests are most helpful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, issues with the eardrum and/or little bones inside the ear, because these can happen at the same time as age- or noise-related hearing loss, it’s essential to include to recognize everything that’s happening with your ears.
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 preserve healthy hearing, and let you know what your treatment options are if you have hearing loss or tinnitus.