Most people aren’t proactive about their hearing health and likely haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s usually 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 evaluate whether using treatments like hearing aids is effective.
You might not get a lollipop after your full audiometry test, which is more involved than you probably recall from your childhood, but you will get a greater understanding of the health of your hearing. Here are three of the most common types of hearing tests and what they’ll tell you.
Pure tone testing
We normally think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels just indicate the intensity of a sound. Another important factor is pitch or tone which assesses the frequency of sound. At the lower end of the tone spectrum, a low bass sound measures 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 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.
We’ll monitor the minimum volume necessary for you to hear each sound. Whether your hearing loss is more pronounced in one ear than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most trouble hearing, and generally how well your ears are functioning, will be measured by this test.
Speech audiometry
This type of test measures your ability to accurately hear spoken words, again with sounds being played through headphones. In some circumstances, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken along with background noise. In other cases, the person doing 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 understand what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker’s mouth keeps you from lip reading (something you may not even recognize you’ve been doing). For individuals who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are difficult to distinguish.
Rather than simply looking at the volume or threshold required for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry evaluates your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Word recognition testing can also help in assessing whether hearing aids might help.
Immittance audiometry
Okay, these can be a little uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. In tympanometry, a small probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially alter your ear’s pressure. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that shows how well your eardrum is working, which can indicate whether there’s a possible issue such as impacted earwax or a perforation.
Your ears have reflexes that are checked by a similar probe. When you hear a loud sound, muscles in your middle ear automatically contract. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to identify the extent of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise necessary to trigger this reflex. Individuals with extreme hearing loss don’t exhibit any reflex.
Though immittance tests are most useful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, issues 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 recognize everything that’s going on with your ears.
Are you having difficulty 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.