Abstract
This paper describes a systematic review (1980–2014) of evidence on effects of transport noise interventions on human health. The sources are road traffic, railways, and air traffic. Health outcomes include sleep disturbance, annoyance, cognitive impairment of children and cardiovascular diseases. A conceptual framework to classify noise interventions and health effects was developed. Evidence was thinly spread across source types, outcomes, and intervention types. Further, diverse intervention study designs, methods of analyses, exposure levels, and changes in exposure do not allow a meta-analysis of the association between changes in noise level and health outcomes, and risk of bias in most studies was high. However, 43 individual transport noise intervention studies were examined (33 road traffic; 7 air traffic; 3 rail) as to whether the intervention was associated with a change in health outcome. Results showed that many of the interventions were associated with changes in health outcomes irrespective of the source type, the outcome or intervention type (source, path or infrastructure). For road traffic sources and the annoyance outcome, the expected effect-size can be estimated from an appropriate exposure–response function, though the change in annoyance in most studies was larger than could be expected based on noise level change.
Highlights
This paper systematically reviews the literature from 1980 to 2014 on evidence of the effects of transport noise interventions on human health
This review has provided a positive answer to an important policy question: do environmental noise interventions change health outcomes? This finding is largely consistent across the transport noise interventions
An environmental noise intervention framework, showing different types of interventions along the causal path between noise sources and human outcomes, and measurement points along the pathway where changes relevant to human outcomes can be measured, has been used to structure this review
Summary
This paper systematically reviews the literature from 1980 to 2014 on evidence of the effects of transport noise interventions on human health. A wide range of noise interventions, noise management, or noise control, actions are included, and the source types considered in this review were road traffic, railways, and air traffic. The intent of both exposure-related, and non-exposure-related, interventions is to change (generally reduce) the adverse health outcomes from noise, and the health outcomes reported here include sleep disturbance, annoyance, cognitive impairment of children, and cardiovascular diseases. Exposure-related actions aim to change the level of noise exposure of people, usually as measured at the external façade of their dwellings. The different noise sources, and the different types of interventions possible for each noise source, introduce considerable complexity to this review, and a structure that provides a conceptual framework for considering interventions and health effects is presented
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