The majority of people aren’t proactive about their hearing health and likely haven’t had a hearing test since grade school because it’s typically not part of a routine adult physical. Luckily, a professional hearing specialist can discover a wealth of information from a hearing examination which can be used to both identify any hearing loss and help assess whether using 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 deeper understanding of your hearing health. Here are three of the most prevalent types of hearing tests and what they’ll tell you.
Pure tone testing
One component that we utilize to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is measured in decibels (dB). Tone, what we colloquially refer to as pitch, is another key component. At the lower end of the tone spectrum, a low bass sound measures between 50 and 60 Hertz (Hertz, or Hz for short, is the unit of measurement related to tone or pitch), with normal speech ranging between 500 and 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 set 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. Pure tones are delivered to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pressing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.
The lowest volume that you can hear the tones will then be tracked. In other words, this test gauges how well your ears function: What range of sound you have a hard time hearing (which can be a key indicator of whether you’d benefit from hearing aids), and whether you’re experiencing hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This test also uses headphones, but instead measures your ability to hear speech. In some circumstances, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken along with background noise. Your hearing specialist will, in other circumstances, have you repeat words they are saying, but their mouths will be hidden from view.
Hearing individual words means you can’t depend on context to comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker keeps you from lip reading (something you may not even realize you’ve been doing). Rhyming words, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be hard for people dealing with high-frequency hearing loss to differentiate.
Rather than only focusing on the volume or threshold required for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry measures 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 determine.
Immittance audiometry
This kind of testing normally 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 change your ear’s pressure. A graph readout will permit your hearing specialist to determine if there’s a problem with your eardrum like earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is functioning.
A related test makes use of a similar probe as an auditory tap on the knee, yes, your ears have reflexes! Muscles in your ear automatically contract when you are exposed to loud noise. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to determine the extent of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise required 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, problems with the eardrum and/or little bones inside the ear, because these can occur 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.
Are you having difficulty hearing? Get it tested! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help educate you on how to maintain healthy hearing, and what your potential treatment options may be.
