Review of field studies of aircraft noise-induced sleep disturbance
TL;DR: A literature review of recent field studies of AN-ISD finds that reliable generalization of findings to population-level effects is complicated by individual differences among subjects, methodological and analytic differences among studies, and predictive relationships that account for only a small fraction of the variance in the relationship between noise exposure and sleep disturbance.
Abstract: Aircraft noise-induced sleep disturbance (AN-ISD) is potentially among the more serious effects of aircraft noise on people. This literature review of recent field studies of AN-ISD finds that reliable generalization of findings to population-level effects is complicated by individual differences among subjects, methodological and analytic differences among studies, and predictive relationships that account for only a small fraction of the variance in the relationship between noise exposure and sleep disturbance. It is nonetheless apparent in the studied circumstances of residential exposure that sleep disturbance effects of nighttime aircraft noise intrusions are not dramatic on a per-event basis, and that linkages between outdoor aircraft noise exposure and sleep disturbance are tenuous. It is also apparent that AN-ISD occurs more often during later than earlier parts of the night; that indoor sound levels are more closely associated with sleep disturbance than outdoor measures; and that spontaneous awa...
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TL;DR: In conclusion, healthy participants seem to be able to access their sleep reliably; and sleep questions asking about specific sleep parameters can be recommended for the assessment of sleep.
Abstract: Epidemiological studies on sleep often use questionnaires, and measurement of validity provides necessary guidance in selection of valid single sleep questions. Twenty-five items assessing different aspects of sleep, including overall sleep quality, specific sleep parameters, nocturnal restoration, and exposure-related questions, were tested. This involved coherence with objective polysomnographic (PSG) laboratory measurements of sleep in 47 participants and application of selected items under field conditions in over 3,000 participants. Items on overall sleep quality correlated significantly with PSG data. For specific sleep parameter questions, tiredness in the morning, time to fall asleep, difficulties to sleep and estimated number of awakenings were correlated to PSG data. Questions asking specifically about the effect of potential sleep disturbances correlated poorly with PSG data, but showed highest effects between environmental exposure (noise and vibration) and control nights in the laboratory and highest correlation with the dose of exposure in the field. In conclusion, healthy participants seem to be able to access their sleep reliably; and sleep questions asking about specific sleep parameters can be recommended for the assessment of sleep.
18 citations
Dissertation•
01 Jan 2017
TL;DR: In this article, a tool was developed to auralise the sound of jet airplanes and consists of an outdoor sound propagation model and an emission synthesiser, which was used to compute an emission signal consisting of tonal components and broadband noise.
Abstract: Aircraft noise is a major issue in urban areas. Due to a rising level of urbanisation and the continuing growth of air traffic more people are exposed to aircraft noise than ever. Methods currently used for assessing the impact of aircraft noise on humans consider mostly energetic quantities, and not the dynamic character of the sound. Therefore, in order to obtain a more accurate picture of the impact of aircraft sound it may be helpful to assess how the audible sound is perceived. Auralisation is a method for rendering audible sound fields and may be used to create audible aircraft sound. A tool was developed to auralise the sound of jet airplanes and consists of an outdoor sound propagation model and an emission synthesiser. The emission synthesiser computes an emission signal consisting of tonal components and broadband noise. The spectral components vary over time and take into account directivity. An inverse propagation model was developed to compute back from a receiver to source in time-domain. An automated procedure was developed to extract features from the resulting signal. These features were then used to directly synthesise the emission as function of time, and this signal was propagated to the original receiver resulting in an auralisation that should reproduce the recording it is based on. To validate the auralisation tool, a listening test was conducted where participants were presented with recordings and auralisations and had to rate their similarity. Results indicate that differences exist between the auralisations and recordings. Improving the synthesis of the blade passing frequency is expected to improve the similarity between auralisations and recordings. Finally, fluctuations can typically be noticed when listening to sound from a distant aircraft, and one cause of these fluctuations is atmospheric turbulence. A computationally fast algorithm was developed to take into account the amplitude and phase modulations that arise as the sound propagates through the turbulent atmosphere. According to the author the method results in improved plausibility of the auralisations.
16 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the relation between objective and subjective noise exposure variables is further explored by carrying out a residents' survey in a highly noise polluted area along two highways south of the city centre of Ghent, Belgium.
Abstract: A growing empirical evidence base identifies environmental noise exposure as an important health problem. While the health effects depend for a great part on personal noise sensitivity and contextual factors, in environmental policy, generic noise standards and procedures based on objective sound levels are used. In this article, the relation between objective and subjective noise exposure variables is further explored by carrying out a residents’ survey in a highly noise polluted area along two highways south of the city centre of Ghent, Belgium. The survey results show only a weak correlation between objective and subjective exposure variables, with both variables demonstrating different associations with the respondents’ background characteristics. While lower-educated and lower-income people are generally higher exposed according to the models, they do not report a higher subjective exposure. People who have been living longer in the area are not necessarily higher exposed according to the models but do report a higher subjective exposure. Most strikingly, owners of a comfortable detached house report a higher subjective exposure than renters of an apartment or small house, while the latter group is significantly higher exposed according to the models. The results support a plea for the joint evaluation of both objective and subjective noise exposure variables in environmental policy and environmental assessments. In addition, the results argue for specific attention for noise exposure of socio-economically vulnerable people and the establishment of a shared knowledge base on noise exposure with both objective and subjective information.
16 citations
Cites background from "Review of field studies of aircraft..."
...Exposure to night-time noise might interfere with the ability to fall asleep, shorten sleep duration, cause awakenings and reduce the quality of sleep (Michaud et al. 2007)....
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TL;DR: This study is the first to relate nocturnal rest in wild birds to levels of noise pollution during the night, an issue that has been shown to be particularly damaging to human health.
Abstract: The ecological novelty of urbanisation poses many challenges to animals. We investigated whether anthropogenic disturbance (artificial light at night and noise) and abiotic factors in cities (temperature and humidity) predict nocturnal activity and rest in free-living urban great tits (Parus major). Our study is the first to relate nocturnal rest in wild birds to levels of noise pollution during the night, an issue that has been shown to be particularly damaging to human health. Unlike previous work on nocturnal behaviour of urban birds, we considered the combined effect of anthropogenic disturbance and urban microclimate to acknowledge that the umwelt of an animal is composed of multiple environmental variables. Using infrared cameras, we observed the nocturnal resting behaviour as a proxy for sleep in 17 birds in nest boxes deployed across the city of Munich, Germany. Although we found marked differences in resting behaviour between individuals, this variation was not related to the measured environmental factors. This finding contrasts earlier studies that reported nocturnal resting behaviour of birds to vary with temperature and light exposure. Although we did not find evidence that urban environmental factors disrupt resting behaviour in great tits, their sleep might still be impaired by the anthropogenic disturbances. To elucidate this issue, further studies are necessary that, for instance, measure brain activity. Urbanisation is a subject of growing concern among scientists, conservationists and policy makers alike. Yet surprisingly, little is known about the impact of urbanisation on wildlife. We investigated whether anthropogenic disturbance (artificial light at night and noise) and microclimate (temperature and humidity) predict patterns of nocturnal activity and resting behaviour in urban great tits (Parus major). Although patterns of resting behaviour differed markedly between individuals, this variation was not related to the measured environmental factors. Our findings are in contrast to previous studies on the effects of urban microclimate and light pollution. At the same time, they suggest that opposing effects of different urban ecological factors may level each other out and thus should be considered in combination.
14 citations
Cites background from "Review of field studies of aircraft..."
...The impact of anthropogenic disturbances on sleep has received the most attention in humans (Lewy et al. 1980; Begemann et al. 1997; Griefahn 2002; Michaud et al. 2008), while only few studies have investigated this topic in non-human animals....
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TL;DR: A strong association between aircraft noise levels, annoyance, and sleep disorders among adult residents near the Orio al Serio International Airport in Italy is found and there is no relationship with blood pressure levels and prevalence of hypertension.
Abstract: BACKGROUND Aircraft noise may cause several non-auditory health effects, including annoyance, sleep disorders, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, and impaired cognitive skills in children. OBJECTIVES To perform a cross-sectional study among adult residents near the Orio al Serio International Airport (BGY), Italy to investigate the association between aircraft noise, annoyance, sleep disorders, blood pressure levels, and prevalence of hypertension. METHODS Residential addresses of subjects aged 45-70 years were geocoded and classified in three groups according to noise levels: <60 (Reference), 60-65 (Zone A), and 65-75 dBA (Zone B). A sample of subjects was invited to undergo a personal interview and blood pressure measurements. Multiple linear and robust Poisson regression models were used to analyze quantitative and categorical variables, respectively. RESULTS Between June and September 2013, we enrolled 400 subjects (166 in the Reference Zone, 164 in Zone A, and 70 in Zone B). Compared to the Reference Zone, we found elevated adjusted annoyance scores (day and night) in Zone A (+2.7) and Zone B (+4.0) (p<0.001) and about doubled proportions of severely annoyed subjects (p<0.001). Reported sleep disorders in the previous month were also more frequent in Zones A and B. Sleep disorders in general were 19.9% in the Reference Zone, 29.9% in Zone A, and 35.7% in Zone B (p<0.001). CONCLUSIONS We found a strong association between aircraft noise levels, annoyance, and sleep disorders among adult residents near the Orio al Serio International Airport. We found no relationship with blood pressure levels and prevalence of hypertension.
14 citations
References
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TL;DR: It appears that even relatively moderate sleep restriction can seriously impair waking neurobehavioral functions in healthy adults, and sleep debt is perhaps best understood as resulting in additional wakefulness that has a neurobiological "cost" which accumulates over time.
Abstract: OBJECTIVES: To inform the debate over whether human sleep can be chronically reduced without consequences, we conducted a dose-response chronic sleep restriction experiment in which waking neurobehavioral and sleep physiological functions were monitored and compared to those for total sleep deprivation. DESIGN: The chronic sleep restriction experiment involved randomization to one of three sleep doses (4 h, 6 h, or 8 h time in bed per night), which were maintained for 14 consecutive days. The total sleep deprivation experiment involved 3 nights without sleep (0 h time in bed). Each study also involved 3 baseline (pre-deprivation) days and 3 recovery days. SETTING: Both experiments were conducted under standardized laboratory conditions with continuous behavioral, physiological and medical monitoring. PARTICIPANTS: A total of n = 48 healthy adults (ages 21-38) participated in the experiments. INTERVENTIONS: Noctumal sleep periods were restricted to 8 h, 6 h or 4 h per day for 14 days, or to 0 h for 3 days. All other sleep was prohibited. RESULTS: Chronic restriction of sleep periods to 4 h or 6 h per night over 14 consecutive days resulted in significant cumulative, dose-dependent deficits in cognitive performance on all tasks. Subjective sleepiness ratings showed an acute response to sleep restriction but only small further increases on subsequent days, and did not significantly differentiate the 6 h and 4 h conditions. Polysomnographic variables and delta power in the non-REM sleep EEG-a putative marker of sleep homeostasis--displayed an acute response to sleep restriction with negligible further changes across the 14 restricted nights. Comparison of chronic sleep restriction to total sleep deprivation showed that the latter resulted in disproportionately large waking neurobehavioral and sleep delta power responses relative to how much sleep was lost. A statistical model revealed that, regardless of the mode of sleep deprivation, lapses in behavioral alertness were near-linearly related to the cumulative duration of wakefulness in excess of 15.84 h (s.e. 0.73 h). CONCLUSIONS: Since chronic restriction of sleep to 6 h or less per night produced cognitive performance deficits equivalent to up to 2 nights of total sleep deprivation, it appears that even relatively moderate sleep restriction can seriously impair waking neurobehavioral functions in healthy adults. Sleepiness ratings suggest that subjects were largely unaware of these increasing cognitive deficits, which may explain why the impact of chronic sleep restriction on waking cognitive functions is often assumed to be benign. Physiological sleep responses to chronic restriction did not mirror waking neurobehavioral responses, but cumulative wakefulness in excess of a 15.84 h predicted performance lapses across all four experimental conditions. This suggests that sleep debt is perhaps best understood as resulting in additional wakefulness that has a neurobiological "cost" which accumulates over time.
2,694 citations
TL;DR: It is suggested that in the clinical setting, actigraphy is reliable for evaluating sleep patterns in patients with insomnia, for studying the effect of treatments designed to improve sleep, in the diagnosis of circadian rhythm disorders (including shift work), and in evaluating sleep in individuals who are less likely to tolerate PSG, such as infants and demented elderly.
Abstract: In summary, although actigraphy is not as accurate as PSG for determining some sleep measurements, studies are in general agreement that actigraphy, with its ability to record continuously for long time periods, is more reliable than sleep logs which rely on the patients' recall of how many times they woke up or how long they slept during the night and is more reliable than observations which only capture short time periods Actigraphy can provide information obtainable in no other practical way It can also have a role in the medical care of patients with sleep disorders However, it should not be held to the same expectations as polysomnography Actigraphy is one-dimensional, whereas polysomnography comprises at least 3 distinct types of data (EEG, EOG, EMG), which jointly determine whether a person is asleep or awake It is therefore doubtful whether actigraphic data will ever be informationally equivalent to the PSG, although progress on hardware and data processing software is continuously being made Although the 1995 practice parameters paper determined that actigraphy was not appropriate for the diagnosis of sleep disorders, more recent studies suggest that for some disorders, actigraphy may be more practical than PSG While actigraphy is still not appropriate for the diagnosis of sleep disordered breathing or of periodic limb movements in sleep, it is highly appropriate for examining the sleep variability (ie, night-to-night variability) in patients with insomnia Actigraphy is also appropriate for the assessment of and stability of treatment effects of anything from hypnotic drugs to light treatment to CPAP, particularly if assessments are done before and after the start of treatment A recent independent review of the actigraphy literature by Sadeh and Acebo reached many of these same conclusions Some of the research studies failed to find relationships between sleep measures and health-related symptoms The interpretation of these data is also not clear-cut Is it that the actigraph is not reliable enough to the access the relationship between sleep changes and quality of life measures, or, is it that, in fact, there is no relationship between sleep in that population and quality of life measures? Other studies of sleep disordered breathing, where actigraphy was not used and was not an outcome measure also failed to find any relationship with quality of life Is it then the actigraph that is not reliable or that the associations just do not exist? The one area where actigraphy can be used for clinical diagnosis is in the evaluation of circadian rhythm disorders Actigraphy has been shown to be very good for identifying rhythms Results of actigraphic recordings correlate well with measurements of melatonin and of core body temperature rhythms Activity records also show sleep disturbance when sleep is attempted at an unfavorable phase of the circadian cycle Actigraphy therefore would be particularly good for aiding in the diagnosis of delayed or advanced sleep phase syndrome, non-24-hour-sleep syndrome and in the evaluation of sleep disturbances in shift workers It must be remembered, however, that overt rest-activity rhythms are susceptible to various masking effects, so they may not always show the underlying rhythm of the endogenous circadian pacemaker In conclusion, the latest set of research articles suggest that in the clinical setting, actigraphy is reliable for evaluating sleep patterns in patients with insomnia, for studying the effect of treatments designed to improve sleep, in the diagnosis of circadian rhythm disorders (including shift work), and in evaluating sleep in individuals who are less likely to tolerate PSG, such as infants and demented elderly While actigraphy has been used in research studies for many years, up to now, methodological issues had not been systematically addressed in clinical research and practice Those issues have now been addressed and actigraphy may now be reaching the maturity needed for application in the clinical arena
2,321 citations
"Review of field studies of aircraft..." refers background or methods in this paper
...(2003) suggested that actimetry is more likely to detect sleep than to detect wake states, leading to high sensitivity but low specificity and accuracy....
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..., 2003). Outdoor noise measurements were taken of aircraft noise event data to link with actimetric data recorded in successive 30 s epochs. Responses collected by actimetry from the 50 subjects at each site were pooled and averaged for comparison with aircraft noise events for that site. The actimeter clocks remained synchronous within ±5 s. An aircraft noise event in the Ollerhead et al. study was defined as the occurrence of an outdoor sound in excess of a 60 dB threshold. The number of aircraft noise events during the night varied across the eight sites from 1 to 20. The 400 subjects awakened from sleep 6457 times, of which 351 (5.4%) awakenings could be attributed to aircraft noise events. Awakenings attributable to aircraft noise events were far less common than those ascribed to toilet visits, tending to children, and other non-noise specific reasons. Sleep became more disturbed in general as the night progressed, but not necessarily because of exposure to aircraft noise events. The main finding of Ollerhead et al. (1992) was that very few of the test subjects were at risk of substantial sleep loss due to aircraft noise. Ollerhead et al. (1992) noted that sleep was largely unaffected by aircraft noise events at outdoor Lmax values lower than about 80 dB (SEL ~90 dB)....
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...(2002, 2003). Figure 3 revises the ANSI (2000) relationship by including the behavioral awakening data reported by Passchier-Vermeer et al....
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..., 2003). Outdoor noise measurements were taken of aircraft noise event data to link with actimetric data recorded in successive 30 s epochs. Responses collected by actimetry from the 50 subjects at each site were pooled and averaged for comparison with aircraft noise events for that site. The actimeter clocks remained synchronous within ±5 s. An aircraft noise event in the Ollerhead et al. study was defined as the occurrence of an outdoor sound in excess of a 60 dB threshold. The number of aircraft noise events during the night varied across the eight sites from 1 to 20. The 400 subjects awakened from sleep 6457 times, of which 351 (5.4%) awakenings could be attributed to aircraft noise events. Awakenings attributable to aircraft noise events were far less common than those ascribed to toilet visits, tending to children, and other non-noise specific reasons. Sleep became more disturbed in general as the night progressed, but not necessarily because of exposure to aircraft noise events. The main finding of Ollerhead et al. (1992) was that very few of the test subjects were at risk of substantial sleep loss due to aircraft noise. Ollerhead et al. (1992) noted that sleep was largely unaffected by aircraft noise events at outdoor Lmax values lower than about 80 dB (SEL ~90 dB). Ollerhead et al. 1992 showed that above 90 dB SEL, the awakening rate due to an aircraft noise event was somewhere between 1 in 60 and 1 in 100. Ollerhead et al. (1992) attributed the infrequency of AN-ISD to the familiarity and adaptation of neighborhood residents to the noise source. Although large variations in numbers of aircraft noise events were observed across the eight study locations, variability in actimetric responses was relatively small. Ollerhead et al. (1992) further noted that sensitivity to aircraft noise was lower during the earlier part of the sleep period than during the later part of the sleep period....
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...Thus, it is challenging to summarize and predict population-level sleep disturbance by aircraft noise (Finegold and Elias, 2002; Anderson and Miller, 2005; Passchier-Vermeer, 2003)....
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TL;DR: It is suggested that cumulative nocturnal sleep debt had a dynamic and escalating analog in cumulative daytime sleepiness and that asymptotic or steady-state sleepiness was not achieved in response to sleep restriction.
Abstract: To determine whether a cumulative sleep debt (in a range commonly experienced) would result in cumulative changes in measures of waking neurobehavioral alertness, 16 healthy young adults had their sleep restricted 33% below habitual sleep duration, to an average 4.98 hours per night [standard deviation (SD) = 0.57] for seven consecutive nights. Subjects slept in the laboratory, and sleep and waking were monitored by staff and actigraphy. Three times each day (1000, 1600, and 2200 hours) subjects were assessed for subjective sleepiness (SSS) and mood (POMS) and were evaluated on a brief performance battery that included psychomotor vigilance (PVT), probed memory (PRM), and serial-addition testing, Once each day they completed a series of visual analog scales (VAS) and reported sleepiness and somatic and cognitive/emotional problems. Sleep restriction resulted in statistically robust cumulative effects on waking functions. SSS ratings, subscale scores for fatigue, confusion, tension, and total mood disturbance from the POMS and VAS ratings of mental exhaustion and stress were evaluated across days of restricted sleep (p = 0.009 to p = 0.0001). PVT performance parameters, including the frequency and duration of lapses, were also significantly increased by restriction (p = 0.018 to p = 0.0001). Significant time-of-day effects were evident in SSS and PVT data, but time-of-day did not interact with the effects of sleep restriction across days. The temporal profiles of cumulative changes in neurobehavioral measures of alertness as a function of sleep restriction were generally consistent. Subjective changes tended to precede performance changes by 1 day, but overall changes in both classes of measure were greatest during the first 2 days (P1, P2) and last 2 days (P6, P7) of sleep restriction. Data from subsets of subjects also showed: 1) that significant decreases in the MSLT occurred during sleep restriction, 2) that the elevated sleepiness and performance deficits continued beyond day 7 of restriction, and 3) that recovery from these deficits appeared to require two full nights of sleep. The cumulative increase in performance lapses across days of sleep restriction correlated closely with MSLT results (r = -0.95) from an earlier comparable experiment by Carskadon and Dement (1). These findings suggest that cumulative nocturnal sleep debt had a dynamic and escalating analog in cumulative daytime sleepiness and that asymptotic or steady-state sleepiness was not achieved in response to sleep restriction.
2,040 citations
"Review of field studies of aircraft..." refers background in this paper
...People probably do not fully adapt to accumulated sleep debt (Dinges et al., 1997; van Dongen et al., 2003)....
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01 Jan 2003
TL;DR: Wang et al. as discussed by the authors reviewed the current knowledge about the role of actigraphy in the evaluation of sleep disorders and concluded that actigraphys can provide useful information and that it may be a cost-effective method for assessing specific sleep disorders.
Abstract: 1.0 BACKGROUND ACTIGRAPHY HAS BEEN USED TO STUDY SLEEP/WAKE PATTERNS FOR OVER 20 YEARS. The advantage of actigraphy over traditional polysomnography (PSG) is that actigraphy can conveniently record continuously for 24-hours a day for days, weeks or even longer. In 1995, Sadeh et al.,1 under the auspices of the American Sleep Disorders Association (now called the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, AASM), reviewed the current knowledge about the role of actigraphy in the evaluation of sleep disorders. They concluded that actigraphy does provide useful information and that it may be a “cost-effective method for assessing specific sleep disorders...[but that] methodological issues have not been systematically addressed in clinical research and practice.” Based on that task force’s report, the AASM Standards of Practice Committee concluded that actigraphy was not indicated for routine diagnosis or for assessment of severity or management of sleep disorders, but might be a useful adjunct for diagnosing insomnia, circadian rhythm disorders or excessive sleepiness.2 Since that time, actigraph technology has improved, and many more studies have been conducted. Several review papers have concluded that wrist actigraphy can usefully approximate sleep versus wake state during 24 hours and have noted that actigraphy has been used for monitoring insomnia, circadian sleep/wake disturbances, and periodic limb movement disorder.3,4 This paper begins where the 1995 paper left off. Under the auspices of the AASM, a new task force was established to review the current state of the art of this technology.
1,918 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors developed and validated automatic scoring methods to distinguish sleep from wakefulness based on wrist activity using wrist actigraphs during overnight polysomnography, which provided valuable information about sleep and wakefulness that could be useful in both clinical and research applications.
Abstract: The purpose of this study was to develop and validate automatic scoring methods to distinguish sleep from wakefulness based on wrist activity. Forty-one subjects (18 normals and 23 with sleep or psychiatric disorders) wore a wrist actigraph during overnight polysomnography. In a randomly selected subsample of 20 subjects, candidate sleep/wake prediction algorithms were iteratively optimized against standard sleep/wake scores. The optimal algorithms obtained for various data collection epoch lengths were then prospectively tested on the remaining 21 subjects. The final algorithms correctly distinguished sleep from wakefulness approximately 88% of the time. Actigraphic sleep percentage and sleep latency estimates correlated 0.82 and 0.90, respectively, with corresponding parameters scored from the polysomnogram (p < 0.0001). Automatic scoring of wrist activity provides valuable information about sleep and wakefulness that could be useful in both clinical and research applications.
1,556 citations