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Noise causes a wide range of health effects, including:

• sleep disturbance;
• cardiovascular effects;
• damage to work and school performance;
• hearing impairment including tinnitus.

To assess the health gains of reducing noise levels, experts drew the following conclusions on exposure-response relationships.

Sleep disturbance

To some degree, the immediate effects of sleep disturbance in adults are quantified through:

• the number and duration of nocturnal awakenings;
• the number of changes in sleep stage;
• the number of electroencephalographic arousals;
• global changes in total amount of sleep stages or in their time organization (sleep architecture).

Exposure–response curves exist for awakenings, based on laboratory results and self-assessment questionnaires. Nevertheless, many questions remain on how poor sleep relates to or induces poor health.

The long-term effects of poor sleep in children exposed to noisy sleep environments are still very uncertain. For example, the potential for developing adult insomnia needs evaluation.

Cardiovascular effects

Among other non-auditory health endpoints, short-term changes in circulation including blood pressure, heart rate, cardiac output and vasoconstriction, as well as stress hormones have been studied in experimental settings for many years. Classical biological risk factors have been shown to be elevated in subjects that were exposed to high levels of noise. In the past several years, epidemiological evidence was accumulated supporting the hypothesis that persistent noise stress increases the risk of cardiovascular disorders including hypertension and ischaemic heart disease. 

Loss of productivity in adults

Noise has negative impacts on cognitive performance. For recall and reading, a reduction of the day and night noise level by 5 dB(A) within the range of 65–80 dB(A) was shown to improve performance by almost 10%. For attention and memory, a 5 dB(A) reduction in average noise level results in approximately 2–3% improvement of performance. These adverse impacts of noise on cognitive performance can lead to a reduction in the productivity at work and the learning performance at school.

Learning impairment in children

Children chronically exposed to loud noise show impairments in attention, memory, problem-solving ability and learning to read.

Hearing impairment

Studies and data are not sufficient to derive relationships between community or social specific noise exposure and hearing impairment in adults and children. Nevertheless, assuming that social noise is not significantly different from occupational noise and that the equal energy principle is applicable, exposure–response curves can be established on the basis of International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard 1999 (on determination of occupational noise exposure and estimation of noise-induced hearing impairment), which uses an audiometric threshold shift at 4 kHz.