AH-EXT-202

Epidemiological study of the associations between road traffic noise exposure, metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes in the Airwave cohort

Road traffic noise pollution is a major yet under-researched public health issue in Great Britain. Every year in England, at least 27% of the population live in areas where road traffic noise levels exceed the World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines, contributing to 1.7 million people being highly annoyed and 380,000 people being highly sleep disturbed. There is mounting evidence that long-term traffic noise exposure can lead to chronic stress via over-activation of the sympathetic nervous and endocrine systems. This can lead to downstream developments of more serious cardiometabolic health conditions, such as cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. However, the evidence is limited as to how road-traffic noise exposures, particularly at levels below current WHO guidelines, lead to the development of cardiometabolic diseases in populations across Great Britain.

It is vital to generate a robust evidence base of the impacts of noise on the cardiometabolic disease pathway, to help understand the true scale of the burden of disease from noise exposures. Especially in Great Britain, where cardiometabolic diseases place a large health and economic burden on society. In 2023, the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee held an inquiry into noise and light pollution, where it was concluded that the health effects of noise pollution were ‘poorly understood and poorly regulated’ and that there was a need for new epidemiological studies to be conducted amongst British populations. This is partly because noise-health research in Great Britain often faces methodological challenges, such as the lack of consent for address use and therefore very limited health data cohorts to do transport noise modelling on.

By leveraging the Airwave Health Monitoring Study cohort and modelling transportation noise exposures for its participants, new epidemiological studies can be conducted and exposure-response relationships found, generating key evidence on the impacts of noise on cardiometabolic health. In our study, evidence will be generated for road-traffic noise exposure impacts on metabolic syndrome (MetS). MetS is a very common cluster condition of physiological abnormalities that increase the risk of type 2 diabetes. These abnormalities are constituent indicators in the diagnostic criteria for MetS and include high triglycerides (mmol/L), high fasting blood glucose (mmol/L), low HDL cholesterol (mmol/L), high waist circumference (cm) and high blood pressure (mmHg). This evidence for MetS could feed into regional and national burden of disease estimates as well as health impact assessments, directly supporting evidence-based policies, cost-benefit decisions and funding priorities to reduce noise-related health impacts and improve quality of life. 

Furthermore, our team conducted a rapid scoping review which showed that the previous noise and cardiometabolic health studies conducted in Great Britain have focused largely on populations living in England and neglected populations in Wales or Scotland, despite Scotland having amongst the highest rates of heart disease and diabetes in Western Europe. This proposed study with the Airwave cohort serves the public interest by providing robust longitudinal evidence on how road traffic noise affects cardiometabolic health amongst a large and geographically representative cohort living in Great Britain.