If you haven’t had a hearing exam since your grade school days, you’re not the only one, it’s often not part of a routine adult physical, and, unfortunately, we tend to treat hearing reactively rather than proactively. The good news: Hearing exams are simple, painless, and provide a wealth of insight to professional hearing specialists, both for diagnosing hearing issues and assessing 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 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 reveal.
Pure tone testing
One component that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is measured in decibels (dB). Another important aspect is pitch or tone which measures the frequency of sound. At the lower end of the tone spectrum, a low bass sound clocks in between 50 and 60 Hertz (Hertz, or Hz for short, is the unit of measurement related to tone or pitch), with average speech ranging between 500 and 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. 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 presented to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pushing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.
We’ll track the minimum volume required 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 an integral indicator of whether you’d benefit from hearing aids), and whether you are suffering from hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This test also uses headphones, but instead evaluates your ability to hear words being spoken. In some circumstances, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken while there is background noise. In other cases, the individual performing the test will say words to you, but there’s a catch, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Because you are unable to see the speaker’s mouth, you won’t get any visual cues to help you, and because they are only speaking single words, you won’t have any context to help you. For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are challenging to differentiate.
Speech audiometry tracks your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which measures how loud certain sounds have to be in order to be heard. Word recognition testing can also assist in assessing whether hearing aids may help.
Immittance audiometry
This kind of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it may be a little uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially changes the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a little inserted probe. A graph readout will permit 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 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. Knowing the noise level required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist measure the extent of hearing loss. People with profound hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.
Though immittance tests are most helpful 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 know everything that’s happening with your ears.
Are you having trouble hearing? Get it tested! We can help you better comprehend your hearing health, inform 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.