If you haven’t had a hearing exam since your grade school days, you’re not the only one, it’s often not part of a routine adult physical, and, unfortunately, we tend to treat hearing reactively rather than proactively. Luckily, a professional hearing specialist can uncover a wealth of information from a hearing examination which can be used to both diagnose any hearing loss and help assess whether utilizing treatments like hearing aids is effective.
You may 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 deeper understanding of your hearing health. There are three prevalent kinds of hearing tests, each of which will provide different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
One component that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is calculated in decibels (dB). Another important factor is pitch or tone which measures the frequency of sound. It’s calculated in Hertz (no relation to the car rental company), with a low bass sound measuring around 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 can hear.
With a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you don a pair of headphones which are connected to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist might use is called a bone oscillator which simply measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. Pure tones are presented to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pushing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.
We’ll monitor the minimum volume required for you to hear each sound. In other words, this test gauges how well your ears function: What range of sound you have a hard time hearing (which can be an integral indicator of whether you’d benefit from hearing aids), and whether you’re suffering from hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test measures your ability to accurately hear speech, again with sounds coming at you through headphones. 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 circumstances, 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 help you, and because they are only speaking single words, you won’t have any context to fall back on. For individuals who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are challenging to distinguish.
Speech audiometry monitors your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing as opposed to tone testing which measures how loud specific sounds have to be in order to be heard. Word recognition testing can also assist in assessing whether hearing aids may help.
Immittance audiometry
Okay, these can be a bit uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. In tympanometry, a little probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially alter your ear’s pressure. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum functions, which can indicate whether there’s a potential problem such as impacted earwax or a perforation.
Your ears have reflexes that are checked by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear automatically contract when you are exposed to loud noise. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to determine the severity of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise necessary to trigger this reflex. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have extreme hearing loss.
Though immittance tests are most helpful 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 recognize everything that’s happening with your ears.
If you’re having a hard time hearing, give us a call and schedule a hearing test! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help inform you on how to maintain healthy hearing, and what your potential treatment options may be.
