If you haven’t had a hearing exam since you were in grade school, you’re not the only one, it’s usually not part of a regular adult physical, and, regrettably, we tend to treat hearing reactively instead of proactively. The good news: Hearing exams are simple, painless, and provide a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing problems 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 common 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 factor is pitch or tone which assesses the frequency of sound. It’s calculated in Hertz (no relation to the car rental company), with a low bass sound measuring about 50-60 Hz, and general speech ranging from 500 to 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 don a pair of headphones which are connected to an audiometer. You might also use a device called a bone oscillator which sounds alarming 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. In other words, this test gauges how well your ears function: 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’re 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 measures your ability to hear speech. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken along with background noise. Your hearing specialist will, in other circumstances, have you repeat words they are saying, but their mouths will be hidden from view.
Hearing individual words means you can’t depend on context to comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker’s mouth stops you from reading lips (something you might not even recognize you’ve been doing). Words that rhyme, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be hard for people 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 measures how loud particular sounds need to be in order to be heard. Word recognition testing can also help in assessing whether hearing aids could help.
Immittance audiometry
Alright, these can be a little uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. In tympanometry, a small 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 such as 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! When you hear a loud noise, muscles in your middle ear involuntarily contract. 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. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have extreme hearing loss.
It’s important to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when problems happen in the little bones inside of the ears and can happen at the same time as age-related or noise-related hearing loss.
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 maintain healthy hearing, and let you know what your treatment options are if you have hearing loss or tinnitus.
