How to Understand the Results of Your Recent Hearing Test

Your audiologist may give you a hearing test to see how well you hear. After you finish these tests, your audiologist will review the results with you to ensure you understand if you have hearing loss and what to do next.

An audiogram shows the frequencies and levels that can be heard in each ear separately. It is made from the results of a hearing test. You can ask to see this graph, and your audiologist helping you can tell you what the symbols mean.

What Is an Audiogram?

On an audiogram graph, people can hear the smallest sounds when they listen to sounds with different pitches or frequencies. Most of the time, the hearing levels of both the left and right ears will be shown on the same graph, but a different symbol will show each ear. For example, it may show that the hearing loss is not the same in each ear, called asymmetrical hearing loss.

It is also possible that the hearing loss will be the same in both ears, which is called symmetrical hearing loss. It could also mean that you have a different kind of hearing loss. In the same way, the data for both ears will be plotted if the hearing loss is the same on both sides. But if the hearing loss is not the same on both sides, the data will be shown as two separate lines.

Low and High Frequencies

You may lose hearing in high-frequency or low-frequency ranges. You will see that the frequency is at the very top of your audiogram, with the higher frequencies on the right side of the screen. If you get your hearing checked and most of the marks are on the right side of the audiogram, you may have trouble hearing higher frequencies. Because of this, it will be hard for you to hear sounds with a high pitch.

Decibels

The decibels (dBs) on the other side of your audiogram measure the volume of sounds in audio recordings. Your audiogram will also tell you how well you can hear from each ear. The hearing loss gets worse in proportion to how many decibels are lost. For example, a mark of 80 decibels means that the human ear cannot hear sounds that are louder than that mark.

You might also get information about what you can hear at different decibel levels, either with your audiogram or from your audiologist separately. This can help you determine how your hearing loss might affect your daily life and how you get along with others.

Word Knowledge Test

You will also get a score for word recognition, which tests how well you understand spoken language. This is in addition to the results of your hearing test. This needs to be checked for several reasons, one of which is that the results can help you determine if hearing aids might help you. If a person’s hearing loss is less than a certain level, an audiologist will not suggest that you use hearing aids.

But this threshold needs to be standardized because it could differ for different audiologists. If you have any worries or questions about your hearing test results, you should talk to your audiologist about them to learn more about what they mean.