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 regular 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 evaluate whether utilizing 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 common kinds of hearing tests, each of which will provide different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
One component that we utilize to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is calculated in decibels (dB). Tone, what we colloquially think of 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 normal 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 may use is called a bone oscillator which simply measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. Pure tones are directed to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pressing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.
We’ll monitor the lowest volume required for you to hear each sound. In other words, this test assesses how well your ears are working: What range of sound you have difficulty hearing (which can be an essential 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 measures 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 noise. In other cases, the person carrying out 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 rely on context to comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker keeps 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 difficult to differentiate.
Rather than simply looking at the volume or threshold needed for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry evaluates 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 little uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure within your ear by pushing air in with a little inserted probe. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that shows how well your eardrum is working, which can indicate whether there’s a potential issue like impacted earwax or a perforation.
Your ears have reflexes that are checked by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear automatically 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 required to trigger this reflex. There’s no reflex response in people who have extreme hearing loss.
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 essential to include to recognize everything that’s going on with your ears.
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, inform 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.