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, unfortunately, we tend to treat hearing reactively instead of proactively. 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.
You might not get a lollipop after your full audiometry test, which is more involved than you might recall from your childhood, but you will get a greater understanding of your hearing health. There are three prevalent kinds 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 only indicate the intensity of a sound. 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 general 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 sounds alarming but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. A lot 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.
The lowest volume that you can hear the tones will then be monitored. In other words, this test gauges how well your ears function: What range of sound you have a hard time hearing (which can be an integral indicator of whether you’d benefit from hearing aids), and whether you’re suffering from hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
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 ask you to repeat recorded words that you hear 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 are unable to see the speaker’s lips, 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 help you. Rhyming words, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be difficult for people suffering from high-frequency hearing loss to differentiate.
Instead of simply 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
Okay, these can be a bit 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 get a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum is working, which can indicate whether there’s a potential 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 sound, muscles in your middle ear involuntarily contract. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to determine 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 demonstrate any reflex.
Though immittance tests are most helpful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, issues 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 recognize everything that’s going on with your ears.
If you’re having difficulty hearing, call us and schedule a hearing test! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help educate you on how to maintain healthy hearing, and what your potential treatment options might be.
