If you haven’t had your hearing tested since you were in grade school, you’re not alone, it’s usually not part of a regular adult physical, and, regrettably, we tend to treat hearing reactively rather than proactively. The good news: Hearing tests are easy, painless, and supply a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing issues and assessing whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
You might not get a lollipop after your full audiometry test, which is more involved than you might 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 tell you.
Pure tone testing
One component that we utilize 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 component. 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 related to 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 can hear.
With a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you put on a set of headphones which are hooked up to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist might use is known as 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 push a button or raise your hand when a tone sounds either in your left ear or your right ear.
The lowest volume that you can hear the tones will then be tracked. In other words, this test gauges how well your ears are working: What range of sound you have problems 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 utilizes headphones, but instead tracks your ability to hear speech. In some circumstances, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken while there is background noise. In other cases, the person carrying out 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 depend on context to comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker keeps you from lip reading (something you may not even know you’ve been doing). Words that rhyme, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be difficult for people dealing with high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Instead of simply looking at the volume or threshold required for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Word recognition testing can also aid in determining whether hearing aids could help.
Immittance audiometry
This type of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it might 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. A graph readout will allow your hearing specialist to identify if there’s a problem with your eardrum like earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is functioning.
Your ears have reflexes that are tested by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear involuntarily contract when you are exposed to loud noise. Identifying the noise level required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist gauge the extent of hearing loss. People with extreme hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.
Though immittance tests are most useful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, problems with the eardrum and/or small bones inside the ear, because these can happen at the same time as age- or noise-related hearing loss, it’s important to include to recognize 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, 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.
