Heart disease continues to be a huge problem in this country. More than fifteen million Americans have narrowing of the arteries that supply blood to the heart muscle. These arteries are called coronary arteries because they resemble a crown, and the Latin word for ‘crown’ is ‘corona’.
The narrowing of the arteries is caused by plaque, and when it limits the flow of life-giving blood it causes angina, a heart pain like a charley horse in the chest. The next step in the disease, is for the narrowing to get so bad that blood flow stops altogether, and it clots. Then you have an emergency, a heart attack. How bad the situation is, depends on which artery is involved. Blocks in smaller arteries cause death of smaller pieces of heart muscle and the patient usually survives; blocks in bigger arteries may cause instant death of the patient as the heart is unable to keep pumping.
The plaque that causes the narrowing in the arteries and reduces their internal diameter, consists of cholesterol, calcium, fat and fibrin.
So how can noise possibly cause that to get worse?
The answer is by causing stress to the brain, which responds by causing the body to make extra adrenaline and cortisol. The extra adrenaline makes the heart beat faster and harder, bending and stressing the walls of the coronary arteries with
each heartbeat, and cranking up the blood pressure. Too much stress on the delicate lining of the arteries makes them more vulnerable to plaque formation.
According to Professor Prasher working at London University in England: “Noise pollution may be causing hundreds of thousands of heart deaths each year.” In Europe, about 2 percent of the population suffer from severely disturbed sleep, and another 15 percent suffer annoyance due to community noise, such as road traffic and aircraft noise.
The threshold for causing heart problems was found to be 50 decibels of chronic night time exposure.
What is a decibel? And what is 50 decibels equivalent to? The answer is decibels are a way of measuring loudness of sounds, for example, silence is 0 decibels, normal conversation is 60 decibels, a lawnmower is 90 decibels, and the peak sound at a rock concert is 150 decibels. So, it doesn’t take much of sustained noise to cause health problems.
According to a recent article in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, more than 100 million Americans are exposed to unhealthy levels of noise. Even more significantly, the same researchers found that a 5 decibel noise reduction would reduce the prevalence of high blood pressure by 1.4 percent, and heart disease by 1.8 percent. Conversely, Dr. Basner reported in 2014, that the risk of high blood pressure or coronary artery disease increased by 7-17 percent per 10 decibels increase in noise exposure.
So, essentially, what we are finding in the United States, is that all the same noise problems that plague European nations also occur over here at home.
What can be done to reduce this death toll? The Preventive Medicine article had some interesting suggestions. These included low noise pavement and quiet tire design, traffic calming measures, noise barriers, changes in aircraft flight patterns, and the adoption of electric vehicles.
At this time doctors are just in the early stages of investigating the deadly impact of noise on the health of patients. Further research is clearly needed, “as environmental noise exposure is a preventable risk factor for cardiovascular disease that is closely tied to government regulation, rather than personal risk factors such as smoking, stress and diet.”
Not only would reducing noise pollution save lives, it would reduce health care costs. Right now we spend $96 billion taking care of patients with heart disease each year, and lose more than $80 billion in lost productivity!