Understanding Your Hearing Test | Natus Astera 2

Understanding Your Hearing Loss, how to read an audiogram, and how it impacts your performance with hearing aids. Doctor Cliff Olson, Audiologist and founder of Applied Hearing Solutions in Phoenix Arizona, explains how to understand an Audiogram and how it impacts your benefit with hearing aids.

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Understanding your hearing loss can be difficult. Especially if your hearing care provider does not do a good job of helping you understand how your hearing loss impacts your prognosis for success with hearing aids. Here is the process of having your hearing tested and what it actually means when it comes to hearing loss treatment.

First, you will have Air Conduction Testing performed. This is when you wear headphones or insert earphones and listen for beeps. This tells us your hearing ability when sound has to travel through the outer ear, middle ear, and the inner ear. These will be indicated on an Audiogram by X's for the Left ear and O's for the Right ear. The further down the graph you see these markings, the louder the sound needs to be before you can barely hear it. This is also frequency specific with Low-Frequency sounds on the Left side of the graph and High-Frequency sounds on the Right side of the graph.

Second, Bone Conduction testing is performed. This is where we place a bone oscillator (vibrator) behind your ear on the Mastoid bone of your skull. This vibration will stimulate the Cochlea, aka your hearing organ, to tell us the hearing ability of the Cochlea specifically. These are indicated by either Angle or Square Brackets on the audiogram. If they match up with the air conduction X's and O's then we know that the hearing loss is either inside the Cochlea or Auditory nerve. If they do not match up with the air conduction results, then we know that the Outer and Middle ear has an impact on your hearing.

Speech Reception Thresholds (SRTs) are completed next. This is when you are presented two syllable words that become gradually softer and softer until you can barely understand 50% of the words presented. This should correspond with your Pure Tone Average, which is your average of Air Conduction Thresholds of 500 Hz, 1 kHz, and 2 kHz. If they are in agreement, then we know the test is reliable. If they are out of agreement, it raises the question of reliability of the Air conduction thresholds or the SRTs.

Last but not least, we have Word Recognition Scores (WRS). This is when you are presented words at a fully audible level to evaluate your ability to comprehend speech without visual cues, and without context. This will give us and understanding of your overall hearing ability if you were to use hearing aids to treat your hearing loss. If you score well during this test, then you would expect to do well with hearing aids. If you score poorly, then you would expect to have limited benefit with hearing aids.

Hearing aids are designed to return audibility to sounds that would go unheard with a hearing loss. If programmed well, we would expect that you would perform close to your Word Recognition Scores in a quiet situation. In background noise, you should also perform somewhat better since in most cases, the return of high frequency sounds to your brain will improve your ability to separate speech from noise. However, additional testing in the form of a Speech in Noise test may be required for full understanding of performance.

At the end of the day, understanding your hearing test is critical when it comes to understanding how much hearing aids should help to treat your hearing loss.