The majority of individuals aren’t proactive about their hearing health and probably haven’t had a hearing test since grade school because it’s typically not part of a routine adult physical. The good news: Hearing tests are simple, painless, and supply a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for diagnosing hearing issues and determining 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 deeper understanding of your hearing health. Here are three of the most prevalent kinds of hearing tests and what they’ll reveal.
Pure tone testing
We usually think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels only express the intensity of a sound. Another important aspect is pitch or tone which measures the frequency of sound. At the lower end of the pitch 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 normal speech ranging between 500 and 3,000 Hz. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the spectrum 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 set of headphones which are connected to an audiometer. You may also wear a device called a bone oscillator which sounds scary but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. 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. 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 gauged 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 cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken along with background noise. In other situations, the individual 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 reading lips (something you may not even realize 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.
Instead of simply focusing on the volume or threshold needed for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Word recognition testing can also help in determining whether hearing aids could help.
Immittance audiometry
Alright, these can be a little uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. Tympanometry artificially changes the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a small inserted probe. A graph readout will permit your hearing specialist to determine if there’s a problem with your eardrum like earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is working.
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. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to identify the severity of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise necessary to trigger this reflex. There’s no reflex response in people who have profound hearing loss.
Though immittance tests are most helpful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, issues with the eardrum and/or small bones inside the ear, because these can occur at the same time as age- or noise-related hearing loss, it’s essential to include to recognize everything that’s happening with your ears.
Are you having trouble hearing? Get it tested! We can help you better understand 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.