Cardiovascular mortality and transportation noise: a prospective Swiss cohort study

Transportation noise from road, rail and air traffic can be detrimental to health and wellbeing. Previous studies, including our own, have shown death from specific cardiovascular diseases (CVD) to be associated with these exposures. Now, with 15 years of follow-up, integrated address history and noise exposure data for multiple years corresponding to census decades, we conducted an extended analysis of the Swiss National Cohort. Mean exposure in 5-year periods were calculated, and three virtual sub-cohorts were defined (2001-2006, etc.) in addition to the full cohort (2001-2015). Multi-pollutant (Lden_road, Lden_rail, Lden_air), time dependent Cox proportional hazards models were applied to 4.14 million adults and adjusted for potential confounders and PM2.5. During the 15-year follow-up, there were 277,506 CVD and 34,200 myocardial infarction (MI) deaths. In the full cohort, there was an increased risk of death for road traffic (1.029 [1.024−1.034] CVD; 1.043 [1.029−1.058] MI per 10dB), railway (1.013 [1.010−1.017] CVD; 1.020 [1.010−1.030] MI) and aircraft noise (1.040 [1.020−1.060] MI). For road traffic noise, Hazard ratios (HR) were higher in males vs. females and in younger vs. older age groups. HRs were also remarkably consistent with our previous analysis with follow-up until 2008, and were relatively similar across the three virtual sub-cohorts.