Road Traffic Noise Exposure and Depression/Anxiety: An Updated Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Abstract

Unlike other World Health Organization evidence reviews, the systematic review on mental disorders could not provide a quantitative estimate of the effect of environmental noise. With that in mind, we aimed to update it with additional studies published through to 18 August 2019 in order to allow for a formal meta-analysis of the association of residential road traffic noise with anxiety and depression. The quality effects and random effects estimators were used for meta-analysis and the robustness of findings was tested in several sensitivity analyses. Ten studies were included in the qualitative synthesis, from which we extracted 15 estimates for depression (n = 1,201,168) and five for anxiety (n = 372,079). Almost all studies were cross-sectional and the risk of bias in them was generally high. We found 4% (95% CI: −3%, 11%) higher odds of depression and 12% (95% CI: −4%, 30%) of anxiety associated with a 10 dB(A) increase in day–evening–night noise level (Lden). Both models suffered from moderate heterogeneity (55% and 54%), but there was evidence of publication bias only in the depression model. These findings were robust with no evidence of study-level moderators. A sensitivity analysis on an alternative set of categorically-reported estimates supported a linear relationship between Lden and depression. Taking into account an overall quality assessment for the included studies, we conclude that there is evidence of “very low” quality that increasing exposure to road traffic noise may be associated with depression and anxiety.

Evidence for Environmental Noise Effects on Health for the United Kingdom Policy Context: A Systematic Review of the Effects of Environmental Noise on Mental Health, Wellbeing, Quality of Life, Cancer, Dementia, Birth, Reproductive Outcomes, and Cognition

“…This difference can be attributed to an increase in longitudinal evidence since the review undertaken for the WHO, and the conclusion of the current review should be considered to stand. During the preparation of this paper, a further systematic review of road traffic noise effects on depression and anxiety [54] was published, which meta-analysed a wide range of measures of depression and anxiety measures (medication use, symptom reports, diagnoses), concluding that there was low quality evidence for a harmful effect. This conclusion agrees with the current systematic review.…”

“…However, the reviews differ in methodology, as Schubert et al, 2019 did not undertake the GRADE assessment but has the advantage of conducting meta-analyses albeit on a very small number of studies. All the reviews of the field of environmental noise effects on mental health identify the need for more studies that use similar outcomes and techniques [6,54,55,57]. At present, taken as a whole, the evidence suggests there are harmful effects of noise on mental health for children and adolescents: further studies will help to clarify whether this relationship holds for the wide variety of childhood mental health outcomes that have been investigated.…”

“…Limitations of the reviews include the relatively short-time frame covered by the reviews; restrictions to papers published in English and the use of only two databases for the searches (PubMed and Science Direct) due to time-constraints for this rapid review. The scope of this review was to examine the evidence for an effect for each measure of the health outcome individually, rather than combining across wider categorisations, as undertaken by the recent systematic review and meta-analysis of road traffic noise effects on depression and anxiety [54]. However, despite differing methodological approaches, the two recent reviews come to the same conclusion.…”

Train-Induced Building Vibration and Radiated Noise by Considering Soil Properties

“…Urban areas affected by noise typically include schools, residence, office buildings, markets, airports, and subway stations [29][30][31][32][33]. To predict the structure-radiated noise, methods such as numerical methods, empirical formulas, or experimental methods can be adopted [34,35]. The empirical formula method is widely used because of its convenience and low cost [36].…”

Ambient Air Pollution, Extreme Temperatures and Birth Outcomes: A Protocol for an Umbrella Review, Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…Stringent inclusion/exclusion criteria will improve the homogeneity among primary studies for valid cause-and-effect reviews, but this can limit the external generalisability and applicability of the findings [43]. Acknowledging the potential of these study designs in shedding light on the exposure-outcome association, recent reviews in environmental and occupational health are increasingly including ecological and analytical cross-sectional studies [22,23,[44][45][46]. Moreover, searching databases alone is not necessarily sufficient to retrieve relevant studies [47] from LMICs and some reviews searched one [22] or two [20,25] databases.…”