The majority of individuals aren’t proactive about the health of their hearing and likely haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s usually not part of a routine adult physical. The good news: Hearing exams are easy, painless, and supply a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for diagnosing hearing problems and assessing whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
You may 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 your hearing health. There are three common kinds of hearing tests, each of which will provide different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
One factor that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is measured in decibels (dB). Tone, what we conversationally think of as pitch, is another key factor. 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 associated with tone or pitch), with average speech ranging between 500 and 3,000 Hz. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the range of frequencies that a healthy human ear is able to 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. You might also wear a device called a bone oscillator which seems alarming but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. 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.
The lowest volume that you can hear the tones will then be tracked. Whether your hearing loss is more marked in one ear than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most difficulty hearing, and generally how well your ears are working, will be gauged by this test.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test evaluates your ability to accurately hear speech, again with sounds coming at you through headphones. Your hearing specialist will sometimes have you repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background sound. Your hearing specialist will, in other instances, have you repeat words they are saying, but their mouths will be hidden from view.
Because you are unable to see the speaker’s mouth, you won’t get any visual cues to help you, and because they are only speaking single words, you won’t have any context to help you. Rhyming words, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be challenging for individuals suffering from high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which calculates how loud specific sounds have to be in order to be heard. Whether hearing aids will be helpful is another thing that word recognition testing can help determine.
Immittance audiometry
This type of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it may be a bit uncomfortable. In tympanometry, a little probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially change your ear’s pressure. Your hearing specialist will have 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 makes use of 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 sound. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to determine the severity of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise needed to trigger this reflex. People with extreme hearing loss don’t exhibit any reflex.
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 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 comprehend 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.