Road Traffic Noises Linked With High Blood Pressure: Study
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However, people who had high exposure to both traffic noise and air pollution had the highest hypertension risk, showing that air pollution plays a role as well. "Road traffic noise and traffic-related air pollution coexist around us," Huang said. "It is essential to explore the independent effects of road traffic noise, rather than the total environment." The findings can support public health measures because they confirm that exposure to road traffic noise is harmful to our blood pressure, she said.
Policymaking may alleviate the adverse impacts of road traffic noise as a societal effort, such as setting stricter noise guidelines and enforcement, improving road conditions and urban design, and investing advanced technology in quieter vehicles. "To date, this is the first large-sized prospective study directly addressing the effect of road traffic noise on the incidence of newly-diagnosed hypertension," said Jiandong Zhang, cardiovascular disease fellow in the division of cardiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of the accompanying editorial comment.
"The data demonstrated in this article provides a higher quality of evidence to justify the potential to modify road traffic noise and air pollution from both individual and societal levels in improving cardiovascular health."
As a follow-up, Huang said field studies are underway to better understand the pathophysiological mechanisms through which road noise affects hypertension. The study was supervised by Kazem Rahimi, lead of the Deep Medicine program at the Nuffield Department of Women's and Reproductive Health at the University of Oxford, and Samuel Cai, lecturer in environmental epidemiology at the Centre for Environmental Health and Sustainability at the University of Leicester.
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Sunday, March 26, 2023 at 11:59 am