Aircraft noise is a considerable environmental stressor for communities surrounding airports. There is also growing interest in the relationship between noise and health outcomes as exposure has been associated with physiological and psychological effects. Yet the extent to which aircraft noise influences cardiovascular health and cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk is still unclear. There is a shortage of noise-health studies in general, with very little noise characterization in the United States (U.S.) and few noise-health studies conducted using U.S. data. There is also a lack of attention to the inequitable burden of noise exposure on different communities. Most epidemiological studies evaluating the noise-CVD relationship have been unable to systematically incorporate spatially-resolved and time-dependent noise exposures, with few simultaneously examining multiple types of airports.
This dissertation aimed to investigate the longitudinal cardiovascular effects of aircraft noise using modeled noise data from 1995–2015 in 5-year intervals for 90 U.S. airports. We first investigated the long-term trends of aircraft noise exposure and demographics of exposed populations in the U.S., then assessed the relationships between aircraft noise exposure and hypertension and CVD in the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) study cohorts. WHI has followed over 160,000 post-menopausal women recruited from 1993–1998 across 24 U.S. states. Specifically, this dissertation addressed previous study limitations and expanded our understanding of the noise-health relationship by: (aim 1) characterizing spatiotemporal trends of aircraft noise exposure within the U.S. by investigating airport characteristics and demographics of populations exposed; (aim 2) investigating the effect of aircraft noise exposure on incident hypertension, a prominent CVD risk factor; and (aim 3) investigating the effect of aircraft noise exposure on CVD risk.
Evaluations of temporal trends in noise exposure (aim 1) showed non-monotonic trends in noise contour areas over time among our sample of 90 U.S. airports. We found disparities in the demographics of exposed communities, where minority populations (e.g., Hispanics/Latinos, Blacks/African Americans) had greater proportions of exposure among their respective sub-populations compared to those who identified as non-Hispanic or White alone across all study years. In evaluating the association between aircraft noise exposure and incident hypertension (aim 2), we found a small yet non-significant association, with indications of elevated risk among post-menopausal women living in areas with lesser ambient noise. Finally, in evaluating the association between aircraft noise exposure and incident CVD (aim 3), we found significant positive risk among participants of the WHI Observational Studies cohort, but not the Clinical Trials.
Aviation usage and interest in aircraft noise is continuously growing on both national and international scales. Study results may contribute to the overall scientific knowledge needed to inform policies and targeted interventions for reducing aircraft noise-associated health effects, particularly among vulnerable populations, while reinforcing the need for more large-scale cohort studies investigating the relationships between aircraft noise exposure and adverse health outcomes. / 2024-05-18T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/44456 |
| Date | 18 May 2022 |
| Creators | Nguyen, Daniel Dangkhoa |
| Contributors | Peters, Junenette L. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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