Comparing the Effects of Road, Railway, and Aircraft Noise on Sleep: Exposure–Response Relationships from Pooled Data of Three Laboratory Studies

Abstract

Objectives: Air, road, and railway traffic, the three major sources of traffic noise, have been reported to differently impact on annoyance. However, these findings may not be transferable to physiological reactions during sleep which are considered to decrease nighttime recovery and might mediate long-term negative health effects. Studies on awakenings from sleep indicate that railway noise, while having the least impact on annoyance, may have the most disturbing properties on sleep compared to aircraft noise. This study presents a comparison between the three major traffic modes and their probability to cause awakenings. In combining acoustical and polysomnographical data from three laboratory studies sample size and generalizability of the findings were increased. Methods: Data from three laboratory studies were pooled, conducted at two sites in Germany (German Aerospace Center, Cologne, and Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors, Dortmund). In total, the impact of 109,836 noise events on polysomnographically assessed awakenings was analyzed in 237 subjects using a random intercept logistic regression model. Results: The best model fit according to the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) included different acoustical and sleep parameters. After adjusting for these moderators results showed that the probability to wake up from equal maximum A-weighted sound pressure levels (SPL) increased in the order aircraft < road < railway noise, the awakening probability from road and railway noise being not significantly different (p = 0.988). At 70 dB SPL, it was more than 7% less probable to wake up due to aircraft noise than due to railway noise. Conclusions: The three major traffic noise sources differ in their impact on sleep. The order with which their impact increased was inversed compared to the order that was found in annoyance surveys. It is thus important to choose the correct concept for noise legislation, i.e., physiological sleep metrics in addition to noise annoyance for nighttime noise protection.

Sleep in Isolated, Confined, and Extreme (ICE): A Review on the Different Factors Affecting Human Sleep in ICE

“…For instance, studies in underwater settings and Intensive Care Units substantially failed to highlight significant alterations of sleep or of the sleep/wake cycle (e.g., Trousselard et al, 2015;Reinke et al, 2019), whereas studies in caves showed an increased SWS (Mogilever et al, 2018), contrarily to what has been reported in polar settings. Instead, the decrease in SWS has been extensively observed during the exposure to a systemic stressor such as noise (Basner and Samel, 2005;Griefahn et al, 2006), or hypoxia (Rojc et al, 2014;Morrison et al, 2017), even if not conclusive. Although few studies exist, psychosocial stressors have also been found to induce similar changes (Kim and Dimsdale, 2007).…”

“…Given that it is also present during space-missions, attention must be paid to it. Changes in sleep structure have also been found due to laboratorycontrolled environmental noise both in animals (Rabat et al, 2004) and humans (Basner and Samel, 2005;Griefahn et al, 2006). Basner and Samel (2005), investigated the effects of nocturnal aircraft noise on sleep.…”

“…Dose-response relationship between Sound Pressure Level and number of events per night were observed. Similarly, Griefahn et al (2006) investigated the influence of different road, rail, and aircraft noise during three weeks in 24 participants. Compared to a quietly sleeping control group, participants exposed to noise obtained less sleep and spent more time awake after sleep onset.…”

Associations of Various Nighttime Noise Exposure Indicators with Objective Sleep Efficiency and Subjective Sleep Quality: A Field Study

“…Noise induced sleep disturbance as demonstrated in experimental human laboratory studies [22][23][24], field trials [25] and observational epidemiological studies [26,27] are thus likely to be on the pathway for detrimental effects on the cardiometabolic system and mental health. Strikingly, evidence for noise effects on various sleep outcomes is only considered "very low" to "moderate" in the recent systematic review of the World Health Organization Environmental Noise Guidelines for the European Region [28].…”

“…Further, the average sound pressure level (Leq and similar indicators) may not be the only relevant factor; other noise exposure characteristics not captured in energy-based exposure indicators may also be important. For instance, in experimental sleep studies on noise effects on sleep, different effects have been observed for road, rail, and aircraft noise [22,23]. Thus, the effects of noise on sleep might either be better predicted by the number of noise events [29], the maximum sound pressure level [30], the sound pressure level slope [24,31] or by the order of events [31].…”