If you haven’t had a hearing exam since you were in grade school, you’re not alone, it’s usually not part of a regular adult physical, and, unfortunately, we tend to treat hearing reactively instead of proactively. The good news: Hearing tests are simple, painless, and provide a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for diagnosing hearing problems and determining whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
You might not get a lollipop after your full audiometry test, which is more involved than you probably remember from your childhood, but you will get a greater understanding of the health of your hearing. Here are three of the most prevalent kinds of hearing tests and what they’ll reveal.
Pure tone testing
One factor 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 assesses the frequency of sound. It’s measured in Hertz (no relation to the car rental agency), with a low bass sound measuring around 50-60 Hz, and normal speech ranging from 500 to 3,000 Hz. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the range of frequencies that a healthy human ear can hear.
With a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you put on a pair of headphones which are hooked up to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist might use is called a bone oscillator which just measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. A lot like that familiar hearing test from your youth, you press a button or raise your hand when a tone plays either in your left ear or your right ear.
We’ll monitor 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 experiencing hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This type of test measures your ability to accurately hear spoken words, 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 situations, 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 depend on context to comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker stops you from reading lips (something you might not even know you’ve been doing). For individuals who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, words that rhyme, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are hard to distinguish.
Speech audiometry tracks your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing as opposed to tone testing which measures how loud certain sounds have to be in order to be heard. Word recognition testing can also help in assessing whether hearing aids may help.
Immittance audiometry
This kind of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it might be a bit uncomfortable. 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 functions, which can indicate whether there’s a possible issue like impacted earwax or a perforation.
A related test utilizes 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. Identifying the noise level needed for this reflex can help a hearing specialist determine the extent of hearing loss. People with profound hearing loss don’t demonstrate 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 know everything that’s going on with your ears.
Are you having trouble hearing? Get it tested! We can help you better understand your hearing health, educate 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.
