Most individuals aren’t proactive about their hearing health and probably haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s normally not part of a routine adult physical. 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 determine whether using treatments like hearing aids is effective.
A full audiometry test is more involved than what you might remember from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s completed, but you’ll gain a much more detailed understanding of your hearing. There are three common kinds of hearing tests, each of which will supply different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
We typically think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels just express the intensity of a sound. Another important aspect is pitch or tone which measures the frequency of sound. It’s measured in Hertz (no relation to the car rental company), 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 put on a pair 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 presented to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pressing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.
We’ll track the lowest volume required for you to hear each sound. Whether your hearing loss is more marked on one side than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most difficulty hearing, and generally how well your ears are functioning, will be measured by this test.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test measures your ability to accurately hear spoken words, again with sounds being played through headphones. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken while there is background noise. In other situations, the person performing the test will speak words to you, but there’s a catch, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Hearing individual words means you can’t depend on context to comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker stops you from reading lips (something you might not even realize you’ve been doing). For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are difficult to distinguish.
Speech audiometry measures 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. Word recognition testing can also assist in assessing whether hearing aids may help.
Immittance audiometry
Alright, these can be a little uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. 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 allow 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 involuntarily contract when you are exposed to loud sound. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to identify the severity of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise needed to trigger this reflex. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have profound hearing loss.
It’s important to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when issues occur in the little bones inside of the ears and can occur at the same time as age-related or noise-induced hearing loss.
If you’re having a hard time 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 preserve healthy hearing, and let you know what your treatment options are if you have hearing loss or tinnitus.