Sex/gender differences in the association of environmental noise exposure and cardiovascular health - systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract

TPS 781: Health effects of noise, Exhibition Hall, Ground floor, August 27, 2019, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM Epidemiological studies have demonstrated cardiovascular health effects of environmental noise exposure with some showing different effect estimates for males and females. However, results are far from being consistent. There is a need to disentangle the impact of biological sex and gender including social role or cultural norms and the interplay of both. Our objective is to evaluate the current state of integrating sex/gender into environmental noise epidemiology and to quantify the sex/gender specific effects of noise from different sources on cardiovascular health outcomes. We conducted a systematic literature search using the electronic databases PubMed and Web of Science (WoS). Publications in English or German between 2000 and 2019 which provide sex/gender specific effect estimates for short- and long-term associations between noise and ischemic heart disease (IHD) as well as blood pressure and hypertension were screened. We will review the studies concerning conceptualization and operationalization of sex/gender, report male and female specific baseline characteristics, exposure and health data as well as discuss the sex/gender specific results. After study quality rating sex/gender specific effects will be quantified by applying meta-analytic tools. Of 247 and 194 identified articles in Pubmed and WoS, respectively, 33 studies met our inclusion criteria, of which 12 studies deal with IHD, 19 studies with hypertension and 8 studies with blood pressure. The studies cover noise from road (N=24), aircraft (N=8) and railway traffic (N= 4) as well as community noise (N=6). Preliminary results show that studies generally used a dichotomous category “male/female”, did not contain information on a clear conceptualization and missed a gainful discussion of their sex-specific results. In the next steps we will continue with the extraction of necessary information and preparation of meta-analysis where possible.