The majority of individuals aren’t proactive about the health of their hearing and most likely haven’t had a hearing test since grade school because it’s normally not part of a routine adult physical. The good news: Hearing exams are easy, painless, and supply a wealth of insight to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing problems and determining whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
You might not get a lollipop after your full audiometry test, which is more involved than you might remember from your childhood, but you will get a greater understanding of the health of your hearing. Here are three of the most prevalent types of hearing tests and what they’ll tell you.
Pure tone testing
We typically think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels only indicate the loudness of a sound. Another important factor is pitch or tone which measures the frequency of sound. 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. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the range of frequencies that a healthy human ear is able to hear.
With a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you don a pair of headphones which are hooked up 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. Much like that familiar hearing test from your youth, you push a button or raise your hand when a tone sounds either in your left ear or your right ear.
We’ll monitor the minimum volume required for you to hear each sound. In other words, this test assesses how well your ears function: What range of sound you have problems hearing (which can be a key indicator of whether you’d benefit from hearing aids), and whether you are experiencing hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This test also makes use of headphones, but instead evaluates your ability to hear speech. 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 get 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 differentiate.
Speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing as opposed to tone testing which measures 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 determine.
Immittance audiometry
This kind of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it might be a bit uncomfortable. In tympanometry, a little probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially alter your ear’s pressure. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that shows how well your eardrum functions, which can indicate whether there’s a possible issue like 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 automatically contract. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to identify the extent of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise needed to trigger this reflex. Individuals with extreme hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.
It’s important to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when problems occur in the small bones inside of the ears and can happen at the same time as age-related or noise-induced hearing loss.
Are you having trouble hearing? Get it tested! We can help you better understand 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.