Researchers at the University Medical Center Mainz have discovered that traffic noise might make Ischemic Heart Disease worse. To conduct their experiment, they exposed mice to loud sounds (around 72 dB, with a peak of 85 dB) for four days. The outcome showed that the gene expression in the aorta of these mice were heavily inflamed.
The scientists discovered that loud noise can damage the heart and vascular tissue by making inflammation worse. This was seen in an increase of white blood cells with a pro-inflammatory, oxygen-producing nature, as well as an increase of cells which are important for fighting germs. To make things even worse, the team did something called LAD ligation which lead to a massive heart attack and severely weakened the heart’s function.
Animals that were exposed to loud noises experienced worse damage to their blood vessels and they had more inflammation than animals that weren’t around loud noise. The Gutenberg Health Cohort Study showed that people with a history of being annoyed by loud noise developed a condition called myocardial infarction (MI) which caused their heart function (LVEF) to become weak and also saw an increase in levels of a protein called C-reactive protein (CRP).
Michael Molitor and Philip Wenzel discovered something important from their studies. They found that if someone is exposed to loud noises, like those of an aircraft, before they have a heart attack, it will make the heart attack worse. They also concluded that people with a history of noise exposure are likely to have a harder time recovering from a heart attack.
Professor Thomas Münzel and the noise research team have done a study to find out how plane noises affect people who have had heart attacks. The findings are amazing – plane noises can make the consequences of a heart attack even worse by poorly affecting left ventricals, inflammation and oxidative stress! Now it is definitely clear that transportation noises should be taken seriously, like high cholesterol levels, high blood pressure, smoking and diabetes.
A recent research study has found that exposure to noise from aircrafts can weaken your heart and blood vessels after a heart attack. The research was carried out by Michael Molitor and his team and was published in January 2023 in the Cardiovascular Research Journal. They used data from lots of participants to arrive at this conclusion.
