Photo credit: G.M. Briggs
by Daniel Fink, MD, Chair, The Quiet Coalition
In 2017, research done at Massachusetts General Hospital reported that stress caused activation of the amygdala, a part of the brain involved with emotions, and this in turn was correlated with vascular inflammation and increased rates of cardiovascular disease and death. But to my knowledge, no one had yet linked stress caused by transportation noise directly to increased cardiovascular risk.
At the recent American Heart Association meeting, however, researchers also from Massachusetts General Hospital presented information to make this direct connection.
The adverse effects of transportation noise on health have been reviewed before, but the new report shows yet another mechanism for these adverse effects.
As Mathias Basner, MD MSc, president of the International Commission on the Biological Effects of Noise, wrote in 2016, “[t]he overwhelming majority of noise effect researchers today accept that there is a causal relationship between environmental noise exposure and increased cardiovascular risk.”
This new report is another piece of evidence to support Basner’s statement.
