If you haven’t had a hearing exam since you were in grade school, you’re not the only one, it’s usually not part of a regular adult physical, and, unfortunately, we tend to treat hearing reactively rather than proactively. The good news: Hearing tests are easy, painless, and supply a wealth of insight to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing issues and determining whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
A full audiometry test is more involved than what you probably remember from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s completed, but you’ll obtain a much clearer understanding of your hearing. There are three common types 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 only indicate the intensity of a sound. Another important factor is pitch or tone which measures the frequency of sound. It’s calculated 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. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the range of frequencies that a healthy human ear is able to hear.
For pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones connected 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 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 evaluates your ability to accurately hear speech, again with sounds coming at you through headphones. In some circumstances, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken along with background noise. In other situations, the individual carrying out 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 lip reading (something you might not even recognize you’ve been doing). For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are hard to differentiate.
Speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing as opposed to tone testing which calculates how loud specific sounds have to be in order to be heard. Word recognition testing can also assist in assessing whether hearing aids might help.
Immittance audiometry
Alright, 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 permit your hearing specialist to identify if there’s an issue 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. When you hear a loud sound, muscles in your middle ear involuntarily contract. Identifying the noise level needed for this reflex can help a hearing specialist determine the extent of hearing loss. Individuals with profound hearing loss don’t exhibit any reflex.
It’s important to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when issues 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 difficulty hearing, call us and schedule a hearing test! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help inform you on how to maintain healthy hearing, and what your potential treatment options may be.
