11/05/2026
Traditional audiometry stops at 8 kHz – but your patients’ ears don’t ❌
Human hearing extends all the way to 20 kHz, and that upper range is often where the earliest, most clinically meaningful changes occur.
A new 2026 review by Beck et al. (2026) shines a bright light on this issue [1].
Their message?
When we only test up to 8 kHz, we risk missing damage in the basal region of the cochlea, the region most vulnerable to noise, aging, and ototoxicity.
And the consequences show up every day in clinic, with many patients with a “normal” 8 kHz audiogram still reporting:
➡️ Tinnitus
➡️ Trouble localizing sound
➡️ Increased listening effort
➡️ Difficulty hearing in noise
These symptoms often reflect high‑frequency or suprathreshold deficits that standard audiometry simply cannot detect.
And this isn’t a small problem ⚠️
The US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) identified early-onset sub-clinical hearing loss (SCHL) in 227 million people, or 80% of U.S. adults, using high-frequency pure-tone averages (Dragon et al., 2023) [2].
The bottom line: High frequency audiometry isn’t just a “nice to have” – it’s an important clinical tool for better patient outcomes 🎯
P.S. What are your thoughts on testing above 8 kHz?
[1] Beck, D. L., Fling, M., & Darrow, K. N. (2026, January 6). Why extended high-frequency (EHF) hearing assessments are necessary.
[2] Dragon, J. M., Grewal, M. R., Irace, A. L., Garcia Morales, E., & Golub, J. S. (2023). Prevalence of Subclinical Hearing Loss in the United States. Otolaryngology--head and neck surgery : official journal of American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, 169(4), 884–889.
Extended high-frequency (EHF) audiometry provides essential data and helps explain speech-in-noise difficulty when the audiogram is normal.