Study shows the sound of traffic is associated with increased risk of hypertension, calls for public health measures to reduce noise exposure.
From:
American College of Cardiology
Mar 22, 2023 -- If you live near
a busy road you might feel like the constant sound of roaring engines, honking
horns and wailing sirens makes your blood pressure rise. Now a new study
published today in JACC: Advances confirms it can do exactly
that.
Previous studies have
shown a connection between
noisy road traffic and increased risk of hypertension. However, strong evidence
was lacking, and it was unclear whether noise or air pollution played a bigger
role. The new research shows that it is exposure to road traffic noise itself
that can elevate hypertension risk.
“We were a little
surprised that the association between road traffic noise and hypertension was
robust even after adjustment for air pollution,” said Jing Huang, assistant
professor in the Department of Occupational and Environmental Health Sciences
in the School of Public Health at Peking University in Beijing, China, and lead
author of the study.
Previous studies of the
issue were cross-sectional, meaning they showed that traffic noise and
hypertension were linked, but failed to show a causal relationship. For the new
paper, researchers conducted a prospective study using UK Biobank data that
looked at health outcomes over time.
Researchers analyzed
data from more than 240,000 people (aged 40 to 69 years) who started out
without hypertension. They estimated road traffic noise based on residential
address and the Common Noise Assessment Method, a European modeling tool.
Using follow-up data
over a median 8.1 years, they looked at how many people developed hypertension.
Not only did they find that people living near road traffic noise were more
likely to develop hypertension, they also found that risk increased in tandem
with the noise “dose.”
These associations held
true even when researchers adjusted for exposure to fine particles and nitrogen
dioxide. However, people who had high exposure to both traffic noise and air
pollution had the highest hypertension risk, showing that air pollution plays a
role as well.
“Road traffic noise and
traffic-related air pollution coexist around us,” Huang said. “It is essential
to explore the independent effects of road traffic noise, rather than the total
environment.”
The findings can
support public health measures because they confirm that exposure to road
traffic noise is harmful to our blood pressure, she said. Policymaking may
alleviate the adverse impacts of road traffic noise as a societal effort, such
as setting stricter noise guideline and enforcement, improving road conditions
and urban design, and investing advanced technology on quieter vehicles.
“To date, this is the
first large-sized prospective study directly addressing the effect of road
traffic noise on the incidence of newly-diagnosed hypertension,” said Jiandong
Zhang, cardiovascular disease fellow in the division of cardiology at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of the accompanying
editorial comment. “The data demonstrated in this article provides a higher quality
of evidence to justify the potential to modify road traffic noise and air
pollution from both individual and societal levels in improving cardiovascular
health.”
As a follow-up, Huang
said field studies are underway to better understand the pathophysiological
mechanisms through which road noise affects hypertension.
The study was
supervised by Kazem Rahimi, lead of the Deep Medicine program at the Nuffield
Department of Women’s and Reproductive Health at the University of Oxford, and
Samuel Cai, lecturer in environmental epidemiology at the Centre for
Environmental Health and Sustainability at the University of Leicester.
Road
Noise Makes Your Blood Pressure Rise – Literally - American College of
Cardiology (acc.org)
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