Noise sensitivity and sleep disturbance

It has been shown that noise induced health effects are strongly related to non-acoustical factors such as noise sensitivity. It is a stable personality trait and it can be conceptualised as a causal pathway confounder and/or effect modifier between noise and health. Furthermore noise sensitivity partially determines noise annoyance. Recent reviews showed that annoyance associated with cardiovascular disease but not sensitivity. Findings about noise sensitivity and other health effects are inconsistent. We conducted a systematic review in order to evaluate the evidence on the association between environmental noise sensitivity and sleep disturbance. PubMed, Web of Science, EMBASE, Google web search and conference proceedings were screened for studies published in English after 1990. Due to large variations in sleep disturbance indicators, study methods and noise exposures no direct comparison could be made across the studies. However, the results suggest that those who are sensitive to noise tend to be more disturbed during their sleep. Field studies that evaluate objectively measured sleep disturbance indicators are necessary to clarify the importance of noise sensitivity in the causal pathway.