Most individuals aren’t proactive about the health of their hearing and most likely haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s normally not part of a routine adult physical. Luckily, a professional hearing specialist can discover a wealth of information from a hearing test which can be used to both identify any hearing loss and help determine whether utilizing 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 deeper understanding of the health of your hearing. There are three common types of hearing tests, each of which will supply different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
One component that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is measured in decibels (dB). Another important factor is pitch or tone which assesses the frequency of sound. It’s calculated 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. Healthy human hearing ranges from 20 to 20,000 Hz.
With a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you put on a pair of headphones which are connected to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist might use is known as a bone oscillator which just measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. 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.
The lowest volume that you can hear the tones will then be monitored. 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 are suffering from hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This type of test evaluates your ability to accurately hear spoken words, again with sounds coming at you 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 performing the test will speak words to you, but there’s a surprise, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Because you can’t see the speaker’s lips, you won’t have any visual cues to help you, and because they are only speaking single words, you won’t have any context to fall back on. Words that rhyme, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be difficult for people dealing with high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Instead of 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. Whether hearing aids will be helpful is another thing that word recognition testing can help identify.
Immittance audiometry
Alright, these can be a little uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. 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 functions, which can indicate whether there’s a possible issue such as impacted earwax or a perforation.
A related test uses a similar probe as an auditory tap on the knee, yes, your ears have reflexes! Muscles in your ear involuntarily contract when you are exposed to loud noise. Knowing the noise level required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist gauge the extent of hearing loss. Individuals with profound hearing loss don’t exhibit any reflex.
It’s essential to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when problems 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 difficulty hearing, call us and schedule a hearing test! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help educate you on how to preserve healthy hearing, and what your possible treatment options may be.