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Airport noise
is harmful to the health and well-being of children and may cause lifelong
problems, Cornell study shows
FOR RELEASE: March 4, 1998
Contact: Susan S. Lang
Office: (607) 255-3613 Home: (607) 539-7774
E-mail: ss14@cornell.edu
ITHACA, N.Y. - The constant roar from jet aircraft can seriously affect the
health and psychological well-being of children, according to a new Cornell
University study.
The health problems resulting from chronic airport noise, including higher
blood pressure and boosted levels of stress hormones, the researchers say, may
have lifelong effects.
“This study is probably the most definitive proof that
noise causes stress and is harmful to humans,” says Gary Evans, a professor of
design and environmental analysis in Cornell’s College of Human Ecology.
This is, he says, the first longitudinal study of noise and human beings to
look at the same group of individuals before and after noise pollution.
Other
studies have been cross sectional, comparing people exposed to noise to
well-matched controls who were not subjected to noise.
Evans, an environmental
psychologist and an international expert on environmental stress (such as noise,
crowding and air pollution) and his German and
Swedish colleagues, Monika Bullinger and Staffan Hygge, respectively,
reported their findings in the January issue of Psychological Science, published
by the American Psychological Association.
The researchers looked at 217 third- and fourth-grade children in rural areas
22 miles from Munich, Germany, before and after the opening of a new airport.
About half the children live in an area under the flight path of the new
international airport; the others, who were matched for age, parental jobs,
family size and socioeconomic status, live in quiet areas.
The children were tested for blood pressure, stress hormone levels and
quality of life six months before the airport was completed as well as six and
18 months after it opened.
The children in the chronic noise group experienced modest but significant
increases in blood pressure and significant increases in stress hormones
(epinephrine, norepinephrine and cortisol) while the children in the quiet areas
experienced no significant changes.
Eighteen months after the airport opened,
the children exposed to the chronic aircraft noise also reported a significant
decline in their quality of life.
“Although the increases in blood pressure were modest in the children
living under the flight path, they may predict a greater likelihood of having
higher blood pressure throughout adulthood,” says Evans.
There are
indications, he says, that elevated blood pressure in childhood predicts higher blood pressure later in life.
Boosts in stress hormones also are of concern
because they indicate that noise induces physiological stress.
These hormones
are linked to adult illnesses, some of which are life-threatening, including
high blood pressure, elevated lipids and cholesterol, heart disease and a
reduction in the body's supply of disease-fighting immune cells.
Evans’ and his colleagues’ new study adds powerful evidence to
cross-sectional and animals studies which have shown higher stress levels in
children and adults working and living in chronically noisy environments.
Evans
also reported last year that New York children living near an international
airport tended to be poor listeners and did not read as well as matched children
in quiet schools.
Later this year, Evans hopes to report on how chronic noise affects reading,
learning and mental health in the Munich study group.
The study was supported,
in part, by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, the
National Institutes of Health, the Nordic Scientific Group for Noise Effects,
the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency and the German Research Foundation.
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