Cold Response of Digital Vessels and Metrics of Daily Vibration Exposure

Abstract

The cold response of the digital arteries in a cohort of vibration-exposed workers was related to measures of daily vibration exposure expressed in terms of r.m.s. acceleration magnitude normalised to an 8-hour day, and frequency was weighted according to either the frequency weighting Wh defined in ISO 5349-1:2001 (Ah(8) in ms−2 r.m.s) or the hand–arm vascular frequency weighting Wp proposed in the ISO Technical Report 18570:2017 (Ap(8) in ms−2 r.m.s.). The metric Ap(8), which assigns more weight to intermediate- and high-frequency vibrations (31.5–250 Hz), performed better for the prediction of cold-induced digital arterial hyperresponsiveness in the vibration-exposed workers than the measure Ah(8) derived from the conventional ISO frequency weighting, which gives more importance to lower-frequency vibrations (≤16 Hz).