American Journal of Epidemiology Advance Access originally published online on November 23, 2005
American Journal of Epidemiology 2006 163(1):27-37; doi:10.1093/aje/kwj001
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Original Contribution |
Exposure-Effect Relations between Aircraft and Road Traffic Noise Exposure at School and Reading Comprehension
The RANCH Project
1 Centre for Psychiatry, Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, Barts and The London, Queen Mary's School of Medicine and Dentistry, University of London, London, United Kingdom
2 Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC), Madrid, Spain
3 National Institute for Public Health and Environment (RIVM), Bilthoven, the Netherlands
4 School of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Reprint requests to Dr. Charlotte Clark, Centre for Psychiatry, Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, Barts and The London, Queen Mary's School of Medicine and Dentistry, University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS United Kingdom (e-mail: c.clark{at}qmul.ac.uk).
Transport noise is an increasingly prominent feature of the urban environment, making noise pollution an important environmental public health issue. This paper reports on the 2001–2003 RANCH project, the first cross-national epidemiologic study known to examine exposure-effect relations between aircraft and road traffic noise exposure and reading comprehension. Participants were 2,010 children aged 9–10 years from 89 schools around Amsterdam Schiphol, Madrid Barajas, and London Heathrow airports. Data from the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom were pooled and analyzed using multilevel modeling. Aircraft noise exposure at school was linearly associated with impaired reading comprehension; the association was maintained after adjustment for socioeconomic variables (ß = –0.008, p = 0.012), aircraft noise annoyance, and other cognitive abilities (episodic memory, working memory, and sustained attention). Aircraft noise exposure at home was highly correlated with aircraft noise exposure at school and demonstrated a similar linear association with impaired reading comprehension. Road traffic noise exposure at school was not associated with reading comprehension in either the absence or the presence of aircraft noise (ß = 0.003, p = 0.509; ß = 0.002, p = 0.540, respectively). Findings were consistent across the three countries, which varied with respect to a range of socioeconomic and environmental variables, thus offering robust evidence of a direct exposure-effect relation between aircraft noise and reading comprehension.
child psychology; cognition; environment and public health; environmental exposure; noise; reading
Abbreviations: dB(A), a measure of sound level in decibels A-weighted to approximate the typical sensitivity of the human ear
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