Increases the risk of heart attacks, blood pressure and diabetes.
Night time aircraft noise in particular is even more detrimental to your health.
It will shorten your life expectancy with chronic exposure.
It will delay your children's development and affect their emotional stability.
It will ruin your quality of life and contribute to stress.

​

Common misconceptions:

​

‘The noise doesn’t bother me, so it hasn’t an effect..’

​

WRONG! 

Our brain registers noise subconsciously even without overt annoyance. This creates a cascade of metabolic effects that do have an effect on our health.
Osborne published a study in 2020 which showed how the amygdala in the brain which is responsible for emotion and stress responses provides a link for a heard noise stimulus and eventual vascular inflammation. The louder the noise, per 5 db increase, the greater the amygdalar activity found and the greater the risk of a major adverse cardiovascular event (MACE).

Osborne, M. T. et al. A neurobiological mechanism linking transportation noise to
cardiovascular disease in humans. Eur. Heart J. 41, 772–782 (2020).
As part of Thomas Munzel’s nature review, 2021 (45), there is reference to a series of field studies on the effects of aircraft noise on vascular, sleep and metabolic function including increased cortisol release and inflammatory markers. Night time aircraft noise was seen to have a negative effect. (Schmidt 2013) ‘Transportation noise pollution and cardiovascular disease,’ Munzel T, Sorenson M and Daiber A, Nature, vol 18, Sep 2021.
Schmidt, F. P. et al. Effect of nighttime aircraft noise exposure on endothelial function and stress hormone release in healthy adults. Eur. Heart J. 34, 3508–3514a (2013) The WHO recommend an average day time noise level of 45 dB and night time of 40 dB.
WHO Environmental Noise Guidelines 2018.
The European guidelines recommend an interim level of 55dB, however this is meant to be just that, an interim level and not an end goal. The WHO state clearly that any night time noise level above those recommended will have significant adverse health affects on those that are exposed.
These effects include sleep deprivation, but also there is a subconscious effect of noise on our bodies as we sleep and this is where serious metabolic long term health outcomes become an issue.

​

‘Sure don’t you get used to the noise after a while?’

​

If getting used to noise means that our children have a worse start in life as a result of chronic exposure and increased anxiety, no one wants to ‘get used’ to the damage it can cause to the next generation. Also as opposed to getting used to aircraft noise the opposite occurs. Sensitivity is increased.

The RANCH (Road traffic and Aircraft Noise and children’s Cognition & Health) study (12) was a cross sectional study from 2006 of 2844 school going children in the areas of London Heathrow, Schipol (Amsterdam) and Barajas (Madrid) airports. There was an exposure response relationship between aircraft noise and ‘poorer reading comprehension and recognition memory’. Most notably there was no particular threshold at which noise effects began as the association was a linear one.

C. Clark, Rocío Martín et al. ’Exposure-effect relations between aircraft and road traffic noise exposure at school and reading comprehension: the RANCH project’.
Published in American Journal of epidemiology, 2006.

The more recent NORAH study (13) was a longitudinal study which looked at the varying effects of aircraft noise exposure to inhabitants. This ranged from cardiovascular and sleep effects as well as children's health and academic outcomes for chronic noise exposure. For the purpose of identifying the effects of aircraft noise on children,1243 children from 29 schools in the Frankfurt
region were included.

Guski R, Klatte M, Moehler U, Müller U, Nieden A, Schreckenberg D.
NORAH (Noise Related Annoyance, Cognition, and Health) 22nd International Congress on acoustics.
Of note in areas exposed to high levels of noise, or significantly affected areas, children were found to have a delayed reading age of 1 month per 10 dB increase in continuous sound level.

​

‘How much sleep do you really need?’

​

It is worth noting the recommended amount of sleep for adequate health on a nightly basis. For an adult, the National Sleep Foundation (11) recommend an average of 7-9 hours per night.
For children the average time is even longer, ranging from, for a young child 10-13 hours, to a teenager being 8-10 hours.
It is clear that these hours of sleep in the shoulder hours are significantly affected by airport operations currently and planned.
The National Sleep Foundation.
https://www.thensf.org/