Noisy roads are more than just a sleep-disturbing nuisance. Scientists suggest that living next to one could increase your risk of getting high blood pressure.
A study, published in the European Heart Journal, found that traffic noise is associated with an increase in cases of hypertension.
Researchers gathered information on 41,000 people from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Spain at the start of the study and again during a follow-up examination between five and nine years later.
The volunteers did not suffer from high blood pressure when they joined the study, but during the follow-up period 15% had developed hypertension or started to take blood pressure-lowering medications.
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Not only that, scientists also believe long-term exposure to air pollution can also increase a person’s risk of hypertension.
Researchers measured air pollution during three separate two-week periods and assessed traffic density outside the homes of participants.
They found that people living in noisy streets, where there were average night-time noise levels of 50 decibels, had a 6% increased risk of developing hypertension compared to those living on quieter streets.
And those living in areas with higher concentrations of polluting particles were significantly more likely to have self-reported high blood pressure.
Lead author Barbara Hoffmann, professor of environmental epidemiology at Heinrich-Heine-University of Dusseldorf, Germany, said: “Our findings show that long-term exposure to particulate air pollution is associated with a higher incidence of self-reported hypertension and with intake of anti-hypertensive medication.
“As virtually everybody is exposed to air pollution for all of their lives, this leads to a high number of hypertension cases, posing a great burden on the individual and on society.
“Exposure to traffic noise shares many of the same sources with air pollution and so has the potential to confound the estimates of the adverse effects of pollution on human health.
“However, this study controlled for traffic noise exposure and found that the associations of air pollution with hypertension did not vanish. This is important because preventive measures for air pollution and noise differ.”
Jeremy Pearson, associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation, said: “High blood pressure is a silent killer. You may not notice you have it, but it can increase your risk of coronary heart disease and stroke which is why managing your blood pressure is so important.
“This large study shows that people who are exposed to higher levels of vehicle-derived pollution are slightly more likely to have high blood pressure, a known risk factor for heart disease.
“However, the authors only found a significant relationship between high blood pressure and air pollution when using self-reported data rather than measured blood pressure, which raises questions about the strength of their main conclusion. The authors themselves are cautious about the strength of their conclusion that effects of traffic noise on blood pressure can be separately detected.
“The study should therefore be seen as a further pointer to adverse effects of pollution on cardiovascular health, reinforcing current views that maximum exposure levels currently recommended by the EU are not low enough to minimise risk.”
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