If you haven’t had a hearing exam since your grade school days, you’re not alone, it’s usually not part of a routine adult physical, and, unfortunately, we tend to treat hearing reactively rather than proactively. Luckily, a professional hearing specialist can uncover a wealth of information from a hearing test which can be used to both diagnose any hearing loss and help evaluate whether using treatments like hearing aids is effective.
You may not get a lollipop after your complete audiometry test, which is more involved than you probably remember from your childhood, but you will get a deeper understanding of the health 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 factor that we utilize to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is calculated in decibels (dB). Tone, what we conversationally think of as pitch, is another key component. At the lower end of the pitch spectrum, a low bass sound clocks in between 50 and 60 Hertz (Hertz, or Hz for short, is the unit of measurement associated with tone or pitch), with average speech ranging between 500 and 3,000 Hz. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the spectrum of frequencies that a healthy human ear is able to hear.
With a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you put on a set of headphones which are hooked up to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist may 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 pressing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.
The minimum volume that you can hear the tones will then be monitored. Whether your hearing loss is more pronounced on one side than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most trouble hearing, and generally how well your ears are working, will be measured by this test.
Speech audiometry
This test also utilizes headphones, but instead tracks your ability to hear words being spoken. In some circumstances, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken while there is background noise. In other cases, the person carrying out the test will speak words to you, but there’s a catch, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Because you can’t see the speaker’s mouth, you won’t have any visual cues to assist 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 challenging for people dealing with high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Speech audiometry monitors your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing as opposed to tone testing which calculates how loud certain sounds need to be in order to be heard. Whether hearing aids will be helpful is another thing that word recognition testing can help identify.
Immittance audiometry
This kind of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it may be a bit uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a little inserted probe. A graph readout will permit your hearing specialist to determine if there’s a problem with your eardrum such as earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is functioning.
Your ears have reflexes that are tested by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear automatically contract when you are exposed to loud sound. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to determine the extent 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.
Though immittance tests are most useful 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 important to include to recognize 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 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.