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 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 assess whether using treatments like hearing aids is effective.
A full audiometry test is more involved than what you may 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 supply 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 conversationally refer to as pitch, is another key component. At the lower end of the pitch spectrum, a low bass sound measures 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 range of frequencies that a healthy human ear is able to hear.
For 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 just 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 sounds either in your left ear or your right ear.
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 trouble hearing, and generally how well your ears are functioning, will be gauged by this test.
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 sound. In other cases, the individual performing 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 understand what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker stops you from lip reading (something you might not even know you’ve been doing). For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are challenging to differentiate.
Instead of just 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. Word recognition testing can also aid in assessing whether hearing aids could help.
Immittance audiometry
This kind of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it may 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. A graph readout will permit your hearing specialist to identify if there’s a problem with your eardrum like earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is functioning.
Your ears have reflexes that are tested by a similar probe. When you hear a loud noise, muscles in your middle ear automatically contract. Identifying the noise level required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist determine the extent of hearing loss. Individuals with profound hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.
It’s important to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when issues happen in the small bones inside of the ears and can occur at the same time as age-related or noise-related hearing loss.
If you’re having difficulty hearing, give us a call and schedule a hearing test! 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.