Myth Busther: Hearing Loss Isn’t Measured In Percentages
There are more myths surrounding hearing loss and hearing aids than most professionals can even keep track of. If you aren’t careful where you get your information, you could end up confused or even causing more damage to your hearing. That’s why it’s important to find a hearing professional you trust. In the meantime, here is one common hearing loss myth we want to set the record straight about.
Myth: It’s accurate to describe your hearing loss in a percentage.
Maybe you have heard a friend say something like this: “My doctor told me I have a 30% hearing loss in my right ear.”
Fact: Hearing loss isn’t measured in percentages. It’s measured by frequencies and pitches. When you lose your hearing, you lose the ability to hear certain sounds or frequencies. When you get a hearing test, hearing professionals check to see which frequencies (and to what degree) you hear and determine the ones you don’t. Your ability to hear one frequency could be much worse than that of another frequency. Describing a hearing loss with a single percentage wouldn’t take into account that you may have a hearing loss in more than one frequency. It also doesn’t take into account that the degree of loss could be different in those frequencies, making it an inaccurate description of your hearing loss. Hearing professionals usually refer to a hearing loss using these terms:
n Normal hearing, 0 to <25 dB
n Mild hearing loss, a 26 to 40 dB hearing loss
n Moderate hearing loss, a 41 to 70 dB hearing loss
n Severe hearing loss, a 71 to 90 dB hearing loss
n Profound hearing loss, great than 91 dB hearing loss
This chart is called an audiogram. To check your hearing, you will sit in a sound booth with earphones. During one portion of the test, a hearing professional plays tones at various pitches from soft to loud to determine at what point you can first detect each sound. The results of your hearing test are recorded on a graph called an audiogram.
On the top of the audiogram are the pitches that are important for understanding speech. On the side, you will see the loudness level. As the numbers increase, so does the volume of the test signal. The further down the symbols are on the graph, the louder the sound had to be turned up before you could just barely hear it. In other words, the lower the symbols are on the graph, the more hearing loss you have at that pitch.
