WHO Environmental Noise Guidelines for the European Region: A Systematic Review on Environmental Noise and Cognition.

Charlotte Clark,Katarina Paunovic

doi:10.3390/ijerph15020285

Abstract

This systematic review assesses the quality of the evidence across individual studies on the effect of environmental noise (road traffic, aircraft, and train and railway noise) on cognition. Quantitative non-experimental studies of the association between environmental noise exposure on child and adult cognitive performance published up to June 2015 were reviewed: no limit was placed on the start date for the search. A total of 34 papers were identified, all of which were of child populations. 82% of the papers were of cross-sectional design, with fewer studies of longitudinal or intervention design. A range of cognitive outcomes were examined. The quality of the evidence across the studies for each individual noise source and cognitive outcome was assessed using an adaptation of GRADE methodology. This review found, given the predominance of cross-sectional studies, that the quality of the evidence across studies ranged from being of moderate quality for an effect for some outcomes, e.g., aircraft noise effects on reading comprehension and on long-term memory, to no effect for other outcomes such as attention and executive function and for some noise sources such as road traffic noise and railway noise. The GRADE evaluation of low quality evidence across studies for some cognitive domains and for some noise sources does not necessarily mean that there are no effects: rather, that more robust and a greater number of studies are required.

Highlights

Recent years have seen an increase in the strength of the evidence linking environmental noise exposure, such as aircraft noise and road traffic noise, to health [1,2,3]
Experimental studies were not included within the scope of the review, as the review focused on the long-term effects of chronic environmental noise exposure on cognition, as opposed to effects of acute environmental noise exposure in the laboratory
Of searching for papers, the authors felt that some key older papers from the field had not Thesebeen papers were identified from reference lists of existing narrative reviews and were papers retrieved by the database searches and added a further 26 papers to the data extraction process

Summary

Introduction

Recent years have seen an increase in the strength of the evidence linking environmental noise exposure, such as aircraft noise and road traffic noise, to health [1,2,3]. Recently estimated that between 1 and 1.6 million healthy life years (Disability-Adjusted Life Years or DALYs) are lost annually because of environmental noise exposure in high income western European. The World Health Organization estimated that each year 45,000 DALYs are lost due to cognitive impairment in children [10]. Children are often posited to be a group ‘vulnerable’ to the effects of noise [4,12] as this is a time of rapid growth and cognitive development and children might have less developed coping repertoires than adults to deal with environmental noise and less control over noise [4]

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Conclusion