LAUSR

Links between exposure to transportation noise and cardiovascular health have been intensively studied during the past decade, and in Europe transportation noise has been listed as a major environmental health burden second only to air pollution.1 The increasing number of studies is partly due to the development of environmental noise modelling methods that enable exposure assessment for large study populations, often at their residential address, and further the study of severe health outcomes. Associations have been reported for road traffic, railway and aircraft noise.2 3 However, most of the studies have focused on one noise source at a time and not considered their combined effects on cardiovascular health. In this issue of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Pyko et al 4 report associations for road traffic, railway and aircraft noise with ischaemic heart disease (IHD) and stroke. They analyse the three noise sources separately, and also in combination, which adds to prior research. Data from four cohorts located in Stockholm County, Sweden, provided information on several individual-level confounders including …