If you haven’t had your hearing tested since your grade school days, you’re not alone, it’s usually not part of a routine adult physical, and, regrettably, we tend to treat hearing reactively instead of proactively. The good news: Hearing exams are easy, painless, and supply a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for diagnosing hearing issues and assessing whether treatments like hearing aids are working.
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 done, but you’ll obtain a much clearer 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
One factor that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is calculated in decibels (dB). Tone, what we conversationally refer to as pitch, is another key factor. It’s calculated in Hertz (no relation to the car rental agency), with a low bass sound measuring around 50-60 Hz, and normal speech ranging from 500 to 3,000 Hz. Healthy human hearing ranges from 20 to 20,000 Hz.
With a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you don a pair of headphones which are connected to an audiometer. You may also use a device called a bone oscillator which seems scary 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 minimum volume that you can hear the tones will then be tracked. 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 tracks your ability to accurately hear spoken words, 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 comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker keeps you from reading lips (something you might not even realize you’ve been doing). Words that rhyme, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be challenging for people suffering from high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Rather than just focusing on 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 determine.
Immittance audiometry
Okay, these can be a little uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. Tympanometry artificially changes 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 identify whether there’s a potential problem like impacted earwax or a perforation.
Your ears have reflexes that are tested by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear involuntarily contract when you are exposed to loud sound. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to determine the severity of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise necessary to trigger this reflex. There’s no reflex response in people who have extreme hearing loss.
It’s important to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when problems happen in the little bones inside of the ears and can occur at the same time as age-related or noise-induced hearing loss.
If you’re having a hard time hearing, give us a call and schedule a hearing test! We can help you better comprehend your hearing health, educate 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.