Most people aren’t proactive about their hearing health and probably haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s typically not part of a routine adult physical. The good news: Hearing exams are simple, painless, and provide a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing issues and determining whether treatments like hearing aids are working.
You might not get a lollipop after your full audiometry test, which is more involved than you might remember from your childhood, but you will get a greater understanding of your hearing health. Here are three of the most common kinds of hearing tests and what they’ll tell you.
Pure tone testing
One factor that we utilize to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is measured in decibels (dB). Another important factor is pitch or tone which assesses the frequency of sound. It’s calculated in Hertz (no relation to the car rental agency), with a low bass sound measuring around 50-60 Hz, and general speech ranging from 500 to 3,000 Hz. Healthy human hearing ranges from 20 to 20,000 Hz.
With pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones attached 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. A lot like that familiar hearing test from your youth, you press a button or raise your hand when a tone sounds either in your left ear or your right ear.
We’ll monitor the lowest volume required for you to hear each sound. In other words, this test assesses how well your ears function: What range of sound you have difficulty hearing (which can be a key 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 evaluates your ability to hear words being spoken. Your hearing specialist will sometimes have you repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background sound. In other situations, the person doing the test will speak words to you, but there’s a surprise, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Hearing individual words means you can’t rely on context to comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker stops you from reading lips (something you may not even recognize you’ve been doing). For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, words that rhyme, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are difficult to distinguish.
Rather than just 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 assist in assessing whether hearing aids may help.
Immittance audiometry
This kind of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it may be a bit uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure within your ear by pushing air in with a small inserted probe. Your hearing specialist will have a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum is working, which can identify whether there’s a potential 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 involuntarily contract. 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. Individuals 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 happen at the same time as age- or noise-related hearing loss, it’s essential 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 preserve healthy hearing, and let you know what your treatment options are if you have hearing loss or tinnitus.