12/01/2014
Regular hearing tests protect your quality of life for years to come
Like the old song said, "You don't know what you got 'til it's gone." That is certainly true for your hearing! While we take for granted that our hearing will deteriorate as we get older, that's not necessarily the case. Medications you take, illnesses, family history, or environmental factors can all affect your hearing, and sometimes at a surprisingly early age!
It's a fact that often people's hearing does get worse as they get older. But for the average person, aging does not cause impaired hearing before at least the age of 60. People who are not exposed to noise and are otherwise healthy, keep their hearing for many years. People who are exposed to high levels of noise early in life and do not protect their hearing begin to lose their hearing much sooner. For example, by age 25 the average carpenter has "50-year old" ears! That is, by age 25, the average carpenter has the same hearing as someone who is 50 years old and has worked in a quiet job.
According to the National Institute for Occupational Health & Safety, anyone regularly exposed to hazardous noise should have an annual hearing test. Also, anyone who notices a change in his/her hearing (or who develops tinnitus) should have his or her ears checked immediately. The Institute recommends that people who have healthy ears and who are not exposed to hazardous noise should get a hearing test every three years. While some hearing clinics charge for a hearing test, at Hogan's Hearing they are free of charge.
So what's involved in a hearing test? Without getting too technical, “testing” is actually a misnomer. It is really a hearing evaluation to see how well, or how poorly, you hear and understand speech. Furthermore, it is not just one “test” or evaluation. The evaluation process consists of a whole series of tests. In case you are not aware of it, you don’t just want a “hearing test.” You really want a complete audiological evaluation, which is only done by audiologists. This process could consist of eight or more separate tests, depending on your particular situation.
Hearing evaluations are done under carefully-controlled clinical conditions. They are designed to make it possible to give consistent results no matter who tests your hearing; to document and compare changes in your hearing from one year to another; and to compare your hearing loss to hearing of normal hearing people. This means that the results of these tests only reflect how well you hear under ideal listening conditions. In real-world situations, your hearing will typically be worse.
The first step involved in an audiological evaluation is taking the patient's history. Audiologists will also ask you what medications you are on. Then they will check to see if any of your medications have ototoxic side effects that could be causing your hearing problems. This is followed by a physical inspection of your ear canals and ear drums. The next step in the complete audiological evaluation process goes by the name of Impedance Audiometry or Acoustic Immittance Testing. The purpose of this test is to evaluate how well your outer and middle ears are working.
Now that the preliminaries are out of the way, we come to what everyone thinks of when they think of hearing testing - pure tone testing. The primary purpose of pure tone testing is to determine the type (conductive, sensorineural, mixed), degree (mild, moderate, severe, etc.), and configuration (shape of loss, etc.) of your hearing loss.
Pure tone audiometry is done in a sound-treated booth to ensure that background noise does not affect the test results. As a result, you will only hear those sounds that your audiologist introduces into the room, either though earphones (air conduction response), bone conduction oscillator (bone conduction response) or though speakers located in the room (sound field response).
In the next steps, your audiologist will test your speech recognition threshold, your most comfortable listening level, and your threshold of discomfort. The final speech test is word recognition testing. The purpose of this test is to determine how clearly you hear and understand speech in a perfectly-quiet environment when the volume is set at your most comfortable Level
So that’s the hearing testing process. Now that you know what to expect when you have a complete audiological evaluation, I hope you feel much more comfortable about the whole hearing testing process. Perhaps, like me, you too will be curious to see what your next hearing test will reveal.
Nav Balsara, Audiologist, www.cobourghearing.com
More than 10% of Canadians have hearing impairments. But for many people, hearing loss is hardly noticed – it takes place over time and is usually identified first by family, friends, or a hearing test.
