Is Living Under a Flight Path Bad for the Heart?

Excerpt from a Reuters Health Information news item

Friday, October 8, 2010
By Lynne Peeples

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Living with airplanes regularly thundering over your head could risk the healthy pumping of your heart, suggests a new Swiss study.

Based on 4.6 million adults across Switzerland, researchers found that dying from a heart attack was more common with increased exposure to aircraft noise.

“The effect was especially evident for people who were exposed to really high levels of noise, and was dependent on how long those people had lived in the noisy place,” researcher Matthias Egger of the University of Bern, told Reuters Health.

This isn’t the first time that noise has been linked to negative health effects, including cardiovascular risks. But it could be novel progress in determining whether the sound is really exerting the effect, or if it is something else tagging along with the noise, such as air pollution.

“It’s been a problem that when you look at road traffic noise there are both high levels of noise and high levels of air pollution,” said Egger. “By looking at airports we were in a position to disentangle these effects.”

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