If you haven’t had a hearing exam since you were in grade school, you’re not alone, it’s often not part of a routine 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.
A complete audiometry test is more involved than what you probably remember 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 prevalent kinds of hearing tests, each of which will provide different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
One component that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is measured in decibels (dB). Tone, what we colloquially think of as pitch, is another key factor. It’s calculated in Hertz (no relation to the car rental agency), with a low bass sound measuring about 50-60 Hz, and normal speech ranging from 500 to 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 called a bone oscillator which simply measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. A lot 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.
The lowest 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 measured by this test.
Speech audiometry
This test also makes use of headphones, but instead measures 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 situations, the individual carrying out the test will speak words to you, but there’s a catch, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Because you are unable to see the speaker’s lips, you won’t get 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 people dealing with high-frequency hearing loss to differentiate.
Rather than simply focusing on the volume or threshold required for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry tracks 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
Okay, these can be a bit uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a little inserted probe. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that shows how well your eardrum is working, which can indicate whether there’s a possible problem like impacted earwax or a perforation.
A related test utilizes 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 involuntarily contract. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to identify the extent 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.
Though immittance tests are most helpful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, problems with the eardrum and/or small 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 know everything that’s going on with your ears.
If you’re having a hard time hearing, contact us and schedule a hearing test! 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.
