Living under flightpath roar ‘may cause diabetes’
PEOPLE who live below an airport flightpath are 86 per cent more likely to have type 2 diabetes than people who live in quieter areas, a new study has found.
The findings have led scientists to suggest that aircraft noise, rather than air pollution, could be to blame.
The scientists believe the noise from planes overhead has a devastating effect on the body’s metabolism, leading to increased blood sugar levels.
The researchers suspect such changes are linked to sleep disruption, and say that people can reduce their exposure to harmful noise levels simply by closing their windows at night.
The scientists said that, although most flights occur in the day, there could be a knockon effect on night-time sleep through raised stress levels.
Type 2 diabetes – which can lead to heart disease, strokes, limb amputations and blindness – affects more than three million people in the UK. The disease costs the NHS £2.2 million every day for prescriptions – and the new findings could have major health implications for millions of people in Britain. According to the European Commission, more than 700,000 people are currently affected by aircraft noise from London’s Heathrow Airport alone. The link was made by a team of scientists at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute in Basel, who studied more than 2,600 adults in a bid to establish the effects of noise and air pollution.
They revealed their findings in the International Journal of Epidemiology.
Dr Mayanak Patel, of the Diabetes Research and Wellness Foundation, said the study had come up with ‘plausible mechanisms’ for the link between noise and diabetes.