Noise, a silent killer

City din takes toll

City noise kills.

The din of an urban environment can lead to a series of heart problems, coming right behind air pollution as a danger to residents, according to a report.

Over the last 10 years, a growing body of evidence has revealed the trauma noise exposure can inflict, including strokes and nighttime mortality, The Atlantic reported Sunday.

A 2018 study in the journal Noise & Health that examined the data of more than 1 million people found that those living near the Frankfurt Airport in Germany are as much as 7 percent more likely to have a stroke than people who live in quieter neighborhoods.

An analysis published in the European Heart Journal examined about 25,000 cardiovascular deaths between 2000 and 2015 and found that people who live near Zurich’s airport, especially women, had a significant increase in nighttime mortality following airplane flyovers.

The World Health Organization calculated the number of premature deaths that were directly related to noise exposure and found in 2018 that Western Europeans are collectively losing more than 1.6 million years of healthy life as a result of traffic din.

Mathias Basner, a University of Pennsylvania psychiatrist and epidemiologist and the president of the International Commission on the Biological Effects of Noise, said the research is “really coming together and painting a picture of the problem,” which his colleagues call a “silent killer.”

Scientists are starting to figure out how noise impacts the heart, and it comes down to the endothelium, the inner lining of blood vessels and arteries. As loud noise registers in the brain, especially during sleep, the amygdala part of the brain turns on a stress response, which floods the body with hormones like adrenaline and cortisol, even when the person isn’t aware of the noise.

This raises blood pressure and leads to inflammation in the blood vessels, which impacts blood flow and negatively impacts other processes that can contribute to a host of cardiovascular illnesses, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity and arterial plaque buildup.

“If you’re living in Manhattan, you won’t notice how loud it is after a while, because it is normal,” Basner said. “But if you have habituated to it psychologically, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have negative health consequences.”