If you haven’t had a hearing exam since you were in grade school, you’re not alone, it’s usually not part of a regular adult physical, and, unfortunately, we tend to treat hearing reactively instead of proactively. Luckily, a professional hearing specialist can uncover 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 complete audiometry test, which is more involved than you probably recall from your childhood, but you will get a greater understanding of your hearing health. Here are three of the most common types of hearing tests and what they’ll reveal.
Pure tone testing
We usually think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels only indicate the loudness of a sound. Another important aspect is pitch or tone which assesses the frequency of sound. It’s measured in Hertz (no relation to the car rental agency), with a low bass sound measuring around 50-60 Hz, and general speech ranging from 500 to 3,000 Hz. Healthy human hearing ranges from 20 to 20,000 Hz.
For pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones attached to an audiometer. You may also use a device called a bone oscillator which sounds scary but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. 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 track the minimum volume necessary for you to hear each sound. In other words, this test gauges how well your ears are working: 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’re suffering from hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test tracks 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 person 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 rely on context to comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker’s mouth keeps you from reading lips (something you may not even know you’ve been doing). Rhyming words, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be challenging for individuals suffering from high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Rather than only looking at the volume or threshold needed for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Word recognition testing can also aid in assessing whether hearing aids may help.
Immittance audiometry
Okay, these can be a bit uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a small inserted probe. A graph readout will allow your hearing specialist to identify if there’s a problem with your eardrum such as earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is working.
A related test uses 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 identify the extent of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise necessary to trigger this reflex. There’s no reflex response in people who have extreme hearing loss.
It’s important to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when problems happen in the small bones inside of the ears and can happen at the same time as age-related or noise-induced hearing loss.
If you’re having a hard time hearing, contact us and schedule a hearing test! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help inform you on how to preserve healthy hearing, and what your possible treatment options may be.