Health effects of transport noise in Europe

About transport noise

Noise from road, rail, and air traffic affects a great number of people. Exposure to transport noise may cause sleep disturbance as well as annoyance, potentially leading to high blood pressure and increased incidence of myocardial infarction (WHO, 2000b; Miedema & Vos 2007; Babisch 2006, 2008). Transport noise exposure as a part of total environmental noise has also been linked to effects on cognition. Transport noise is selected in this study due to its ubiquity and high public health impact. In addition, due to the economic significance of transport, noise levels despite technological progress keep on increasing over time.

Selected health endpoints and exposure-response functions

As health end-points, high sleep disturbance and Ischemic Heart Disease (IHD) were included (Miedema & Vos, 2007; Babisch 2006, 2008). Hypertension and related heart disease due to aircraft noise was not considered because no clear review could be identified. Nevertheless, since causal relationships are very likely and have been reported recently, this health effect may be considered in the near future (Babisch & Kamp, 2009). For railway noise no significant associations with hypertension and IHD could be identified (Barregard et al., 2009).

Effects on cognition were also excluded, as these are difficult to quantify. In addition, severe annoyance, as annoyance was not included as annoyance does not fall weithin our definition of health and not considered a health effect by, amongst others, WHO. Some other studies (e.g. Knol & Staatsen, 2005) have applied a broader definition of health, in which annoyance was included as a health effect because it reduces quality of life. These studies show a substantial burden of disease due to transport noise related annoyance.

The formulas applied to estimate transport noise related high sleep disturbance (HSD) are as follows. The results directly give the number of people severely sleep disturbed at a certain decibel level for each noise source (Miedema et al., 2002, Miedema & Vos, 2007):

Road traffic noise: %HSD = 20.8 - 1.05L_night+ 0.01486(L_night)²

Railway traffic noise: %HSD = 11.3 - 0.55L_night+ 0.00759 (L_night)²

Aircraft noise: %HSD = 18.147 - 0.956L_night+ 0.01482(L_night)²

Lnight is a measure of night-time noise, defined as the yearly average of night noise levels (23–7h) at the façade of houses. The formulas can be applied in the range of Lnight from 45 to 65 (max. 70) dB(A) (data are regularly available for >50dB(A)).

There is no exclusive causal mechanism postulated specifically to myocardial infarction (MI). Therefore, the OR for MI has been applied to all types of ischemic heart disease (Babisch, 2008) according to the following formula (Babisch 2006, 2008):