The majority of individuals aren’t proactive about their hearing health and likely haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s typically not part of a routine adult physical. Fortunately, a professional hearing specialist can discover a wealth of information from a hearing examination which can be used to both diagnose 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 greater understanding of your hearing health. Here are three of the most prevalent types of hearing tests and what they’ll reveal.
Pure tone testing
We usually think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels just express the loudness of a sound. Tone, what we conversationally think of as pitch, is another key component. It’s calculated in Hertz (no relation to the car rental agency), 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 may use is known as a bone oscillator which simply 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 plays either in your left ear or your right ear.
The minimum volume that you can hear the tones will then be monitored. 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 test also makes use of headphones, but instead tracks your ability to hear speech. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken while there is background noise. 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 lips, you won’t get any visual cues to assist you, and because they are only speaking single words, you won’t have any context to help you. For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, words that rhyme, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are hard to differentiate.
Instead of just looking at the volume or threshold needed 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
This type of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it might be a little uncomfortable. In tympanometry, a small probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially change your ear’s pressure. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum functions, which can identify whether there’s a potential problem like impacted earwax or a perforation.
A related test uses a similar probe as an auditory tap on the knee, yes, your ears have reflexes! When you hear a loud noise, muscles in your middle ear involuntarily contract. Identifying the noise level required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist gauge the extent of hearing loss. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have profound hearing loss.
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 happening with your ears.
Are you having difficulty hearing? Get it tested! We can help you better understand 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.