New Test May Reveal Hidden Hearing Loss
How is Hearing Loss Identified?
Has someone told you lately that the volume on the TV is too high? Have you felt that people are mumbling and you’ve asked them to repeat themselves? These are some of the common signs of hearing loss.
Hearing loss tends go to untreated for an average of seven years because it is not noticeable right away. Hearing loss tends to happen gradually, over many years. As an invisible condition, it is easy to make up for it by reading lips or “faking it” – that is, pretending to follow along with conversations when you’re not fully connected.
If you’ve noticed changes in your hearing, the first step to take is to schedule a hearing test. Hearing loss is identified through a series of hearing tests, which are then recorded in an audiogram. An audiogram is a visual representation of your hearing abilities, broken out by ear, and will identify whether you have a hearing loss and its degree and configuration.
The Different Types of Hearing Tests
There are several kinds of hearing tests, all of which are designed to evaluate the different aspects of your hearing.
The pure-tone hearing test requires you to sit in a soundproof room, and listen to tones played at different volumes and frequencies. You’ll be asked to identify if you can hear these sounds.
The speech recognition test identifies what percent of speech you can hear. It also determines your anticipation of speech patterns and ability to differentiate from similar speech sounds.
Other hearing tests, which are less common, measure your brain’s register of neural signals sent from your inner ear hair cells. During this test, you simply sit quietly while you listen to a series of sounds, while your brain activity is measured.
What is “Hidden Hearing Loss”?
These hearing tests are comprehensive and will reveal very clearly if you are experiencing a hearing loss, as well as the degree and configuration of it. However, there are some instances in which these comprehensive tests do not reveal a hearing loss – which means you may walk away thinking that your hearing is normal, when your experience with listening suggests otherwise.
Two researchers from the University of Connecticut, Leslie R. Bernstein and Constantine Trahiotis, have recently developed a new hearing test to identify “hidden hearing loss,” which could greatly help those with certain kind of unidentifiable hearing losses.
Developing a New Test for Hidden Hearing Loss
Bernstein and Trahiotis have developed “a hearing test that measures a person’s ability to detect across-ears (binaural) changes in sounds presented at levels of loudness that are close to those experienced in normal conversations.”
Binaural hearing means hearing between both ears. With normal hearing, a process of binaural processing means that your two ears “communicate” by picking up audio from both sides and “mixing” it in the auditory center of your brain. UConn researchers find that while traditional hearing tests seem to identify hearing loss by ear, their test in development will help to reveal this “binaural” hearing loss.
According Bernstein, “We not have a validated technique to identify ‘hidden’ hearing deficits that would likely go undetected with traditional audiograms.” In developing this new test, Bernstein and Trahiotis studied “31 adults between the ages of 30 to 67 with normal or near-normal audiograms. The results showed that the individuals who had essentially normal clinical hearing test results exhibited substantial deficits in binaural processing.”
These results suggested to the two researchers that there must be another test developed to assess the abilities of binaural processing. According Trahiotis, “Our study shows that our novel binaural hearing test can help early identification of vulnerable populations of listeners, and perhaps help determine when critical interventions are warranted.” Additionally, results from this study show that there may be more hearing loss present in the American population than previously thought – given this new revelation of binaural processing abilities.
Scheduling Your Annual Hearing Test
While this new hearing test is in its developing stages, we can still rely on the accuracy of traditional hearing tests. Annual hearing tests are crucial to your hearing health, even if you do not exhibit hearing loss. By monitoring your hearing annually, we are able to keep track of your hearing abilities, and quickly address hearing loss if it appears.
For more information on hearing tests and to schedule your exam, contact us at HearCare Rhode Island today.
HearCare Rhode Island
Phone: (401) 737-1760
Fax: (401) 737-1740
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