The health impacts of environmental noise are a growing concern. At least one million healthy life years are lost every year from traffic-related noise in the western part of Europe. This publication summarises the evidence on the relationship between environmental noise and health effects, including cardiovascular disease, cognitive impairment, sleep disturbance, tinnitus, and annoyance. For each one, the environmental burden of disease methodology, based on exposure-response relationship, exposure distribution, background prevalence of disease and disability weights of the outcome, is applied to calculate the burden of disease in terms of disability-adjusted life-years. Data are still lacking for the rest of the WHO European Region. This publication provides policy-makers and their advisers with technical support in their quantitative risk assessment of environmental noise. International, national and local authorities can use the procedure for estimating burdens presented here to prioritize and plan environmental and public health policies.

Burden of Disease from Environmental Noise: Quantification of Healthy Life Years Lost in Europe

Study Objectives: Traffic noise disturbs sleep and may impair recuperation. There is limited information on single and combined effects of air, road and rail traffic noise on sleep and recuperation.
Design: Repeated measures
Setting: Polysomnographic laboratory study
Participants: 72 healthy subjects, mean ± standard deviation 40 ± 13 years, range 18-71 years, 32 male
Interventions: Exposure to 40, 80, or 120 rail, road, and/or air traffic noise events
Measurements and Results: Subjects were investigated for 11 consecutive nights, which included eight noise exposure nights and one noise-free control night. Noise effects on sleep structure and continuity were subtle, even in nights with combined exposure, most likely due to habituation and an increase in arousal thresholds both within and across nights. However, cardiac arousals did not habituate across nights. Noise exposure significantly affected subjective assessments of sleep quality and recuperation, whereas objective performance was unaffected, except for a small increase in mean PVT reaction time (+4 ms, adjusted P 3 kHz) noise event components.
Conclusions: Road, rail, and air traffic noise differentially affect objective and subjective assessments of sleep. Differences in the degree of noise-induced sleep fragmentation between traffic modes were explained by the specific spectral and temporal composition of noise events, indicating potential targets for active and passive noise control. Field studies are needed to validate our findings in a setting with higher ecologic validity.

http://www.laermorama.ch/m6_machtlaermkrank/pdf/03_Basner2011_Air,%20Road,%20Rail%20and%20Sleep.pdf

Single and combined effects of air, road, and rail traffic noise on sleep and recuperation.

In order to determine the influence of noise sensitivity on sleep, subjective sleep quality, annoyance, and performance after nocturnal exposure to traffic noise, 12 women and 12 men (age range, 19-28 years) were observed during four consecutive nights over a three weeks period. After a habituation night, the participants were exposed with weekly permuted changes to air, rail and road traffic noise. Of the four nights, one was a quiet night (32 dBA), while three were noisy nights with exposure to equivalent noise levels of 39, 44, and 50 dBA in a permuted order. The traffic noise caused alterations of most of the physiological parameters, subjective evaluation of sleep, annoyance, and performance. Correlations were found between noise sensitivity and subjective sleep quality in terms of worsened restoration, decreased calmness, difficulty to fall asleep, and body movements. The results suggest that alterations of subjective evaluation of sleep were determined by physical parameters of the noise but modified by individual factors like noise sensitivity.

Associations between noise sensitivity and sleep, subjectively evaluated sleep quality, annoyance, and performance after exposure to nocturnal traffic noise

Objectives: EEG arousals are associated with autonomic activations. Visual EEG arousal scoring is time consuming and suffers from low interob-server agreement. We hypothesized that information on changes in heart rate alone suffice to predict the occurrence of cortical arousal. Methods: Two visual AASM EEG arousal scorings of 56 healthy subject nights (mean age 37.0 ± 12.8 years, 26 male) were obtained. For each of 5 heartbeats following the onset of 3581 consensus EEG arousals and of an equal number of control conditions, differences to a moving median were calculated and used to estimate likelihood ratios (LRs) for 10 categories of heartbeat differences. Comparable to 5 consecutive diagnostic tests, these LRs were used to calculate the probability of heart rate responses being associated with cortical arousals. Results: EEG and ECG arousal indexes agreed well across a wide range of decision thresholds, resulting in a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) with an area under the curve of 0.91. For the decision threshold chosen for the final analyses, a sensitivity of 68.1% and a specificity of 95.2% were obtained. ECG and EEG arousal indexes were poorly correlated (r = 0.19, P <0.001, ICC = 0.186), which could in part be attributed to 3 outliers. The Bland-Altman plot showed an unbiased estimation of EEG arousal indexes by ECG arousal indexes with a standard deviation of ± 7.9 arousals per hour sleep. In about two-thirds of all cases, ECG arousal scoring was matched by at least one (22.2%) or by both (42.5%) of the visual scorings. Sensitivity of the algorithm increased with increasing duration of EEG arousals. The ECG algorithm was also successfully validated with 30 different nights of 10 subjects (mean age 35.3 □ 13.6 years, 5 male). Conclusions: In its current version, the ECG algorithm cannot replace visual EEG arousal scoring. Sensitivity for detecting <10-s EEG arousals needs to be improved. However, in a nonclinical population, it may be valuable to supplement visual EEG arousal scoring by this automatic, objective, reproducible, cheap, and time-saving method.

/pdf/an-ecg-based-algorithm-for-the-automatic-identification-of-4jferclqzm.pdf

An ECG-based Algorithm for the Automatic Identification of Autonomic Activations Associated with Cortical Arousal

Annoyance from nocturnal aircraft noise exposure: Laboratory and field-specific dose–response curves

Effects of Nocturnal Aircraft Noise - Volume 1: Executive Summery

Nachtfluglärmwirkungen - Band 1: Zusammenfassung

Humanspezifische Nachtfluglärmwirkungen - Eine Teilauswertung von 64 Versuchspersonen in 832 Schlaflabornächten

497] OBJECTIVES Studies on the effects of aircraft noise on sleep with a large subject sample as well as with high methodological expense are lacking, and hence statistically reliable recommendations for the protection against aircraft noise can presently not be made. However, scientifically based investigations are necessary for providing proper guidelines for authorities and users. METHODS DLR studied human reactions to nocturnal aircraft noise in laboratory and field experiments: In total, 192 healthy volunteers (m/f), aged 18 to 65 years, underwent 2240 study nights. In the isolation facility of the institute, 128 subjects were examined during 13 consecutive nights. 16 subjects served as control. For 112 subjects, aircraft noise events have been applied between 4 and 128 times per night (45 ≤ LAS,max ≤ 80 dB(A)). Sleep disturbances were assessed by EEG, EOG, EMG and EKG, by respiration, finger-pulse amplitude and position in bed. These signals were simultaneously recorded with the acoustic signals for calculating event-correlated reactions. The concentrations of cortisol, adrenalin and noradrenalin were determined from all night urine samples. At evening and morning, performance tests and questionnaires (fatigue, mood, annoyance) were applied. These data and results were examined in two field studies with 64 volunteers during 9 consecutive nights at their homes near Cologne airport. CONCLUSIONS The investigations will be concluded in March 2004. They are very ambitious and unique, even on a world wide standard. DLR wants to contribute by profound experimental knowledge to the very controversial disputes about the degree of impairing effects on human specific reactions to nocturnal aircraft noise.

Effects of nocturnal aircraft noise - Overview of the DLR human specific

/pdf/effects-of-nocturnal-aircraft-noise-overview-of-the-dlr-wyjcw1wdyd.pdf

J. Quehl

Papers

Effects of Nocturnal Aircraft Noise - Volume 1: Executive Summery

Nachtfluglärmwirkungen - Band 1: Zusammenfassung

Humanspezifische Nachtfluglärmwirkungen - Eine Teilauswertung von 64 Versuchspersonen in 832 Schlaflabornächten

Effects of nocturnal aircraft noise - Overview of the DLR human specific

Effects of nocturnal aircraft noise- Overview of the DLR human specific investigations