Airplane noise may affect children?s mental health

Chronic airplane noise can affect a child?s physical and mental health, according to a recent study by psychologists at Cornell University. Gary Evans, a professor at Cornell?s College of Human Ecology, and colleagues say this is the first longitudinal study to examine a person?s physiological changes before and after chronic noise pollution.

To conduct the study, researchers chose 217 third- and fourth-graders who lived near the site of a new international airport 22 miles outside Munich, Germany. About half of the students lived underneath the flight path of airplanes, while others lived in quieter areas.

Six months before the airport?s completion, researchers measured the children?s blood pressure and stress hormone levels. Eighteen months after the airport opened, Evans and colleagues tested the children again. They found that the children who lived underneath a flight pattern showed noticeable increases in blood pressure and the stress hormones epinephrine, norepinephrine and cortisol.

The increases in blood pressure were minor, but Evans notes higher blood pressure in children may lead to high blood pressure in adulthood. Heightened stress hormones may cause health problems such as heart disease, high cholesterol and low immune-cell count.

Last year, Evans also performed a cross-sectional study on 116 New York children living near an international airport and found that those children exhibited reading and listening deficiencies. Evans hopes to replicate the same reading and listening results in the Munich study to determine whether chronic airplane noise affects learning.

This study was sponsored, in part, by APA?s Div. 9 (Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues), the National Institutes of Health, the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, the Nordic Scientific Group and the German Research Foundation. Evans? findings were originally published in the January issue of the American Psychological Society?s Psychological Science (Vol. 9, No. 1, p. 75?77).

?M. Waters