Can noise in everyday life really affect your heart health?
In 2011, the fourth runway of Germany’s busiest Frankfurt Airport was inaugurated. There were large-scale protests against the new runway that continued for years.
“This runway is destroying my life,” one of the protesters told Reuters a year after the inauguration. Whenever I go to the garden of my house, there is a constant noise of ships and if I look up, I can see ships.
Because of this new runway, dozens of airplanes fly right over Tomás Manzil’s house. Tomas Manzil is a cardiologist at the University Medical Center of Mainz. “I’ve lived near motorways and inner-city train tracks before, but aircraft noise is the most annoying,” he says.
Manzil had read a report published by the World Health Organization in 2009 that suggested noise might be linked to heart disease, but there was insufficient evidence at the time.
In the year 2011, he was concerned about his own health, which is why he started researching it.
Extreme noise has long been seen as a cause of deafness. However, the noise of airplanes and vehicles does not only adversely affect the ability to hear.
According to experts, after air pollution caused by traffic, it puts the most pressure on the human body. That is, it is more harmful to your health than second-hand smoke and radioactive gases like radon.
Research over the past decade has shown a clear link between aircraft and road traffic noise and an increased risk of several heart diseases. Now scientists are also starting to identify the reasons behind it.
It is estimated that around a third of Europe’s population is regularly exposed to severe and health-threatening noise levels.
Typically 70 to 80 decibels, this noise can be estimated from the fact that a normal conversation level is usually 60 decibels, cars and trucks are 70 to 90 decibels, and airplanes are 120 decibels or so. More than
Note that decibels are a measure of sound intensity.
A number of studies have consistently linked this level of environmental noise with an increased risk of heart disease. For example, a 2018 health study of more than a million people found that people living near Frankfurt Airport were seven times more likely to have a stroke than those living in similar but less noisy neighborhoods. The percentage is high risk.
According to a recent report published in the European Heart Journal, a study of heart-related deaths between 2000 and 2015 found that nighttime airplane traffic around Zurich Airport in Switzerland There has been a significant increase in the number of deaths occurring since. Especially in women.
Researchers are trying to understand the stress that noise puts on the human body, leading to an increase in heart disease. The main reason for this increase is the dramatic changes that occur in the inner lining of the arteries and blood vessels, called the endothelium.
Inflammation of this layer can have potentially dangerous consequences.
The path from noise to the blood vessels goes like this: When a sound reaches the brain, it activates two important parts of the brain. The auditory cortex, which interprets the noise, and the amygdala, which manages our feelings and reactions to the noise.
As the intensity of the noise increases, especially while we are sleeping, the amygdala triggers our body’s ‘fight or flight’ response, even if we are not aware of it. Not even.
