Living near ‘here’ raises blood pressure

Living near busy roads is not only bad for air pollution, but also for blood pressure health, a new study has found. This is the content reported by the health medicine webzine ‘Health Day’ on the 23rd (local time) based on the thesis of Oxford University researchers published in 《Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Advances (JACC: Advances)》.

Based on biomedical data from the UK Biobank, the research team followed more than 240,000 people aged 40 to 69 who did not have hypertension at the start of the study over eight years. As a result, they found that the health risk of people living in areas with high traffic noise, such as horns, engine noise, and sirens, increased independently of air pollution. People exposed the most to noise and pollution had the highest risk of developing high blood pressure.

“Long-term exposure to road traffic noise is associated with an increased prevalence of primary hypertension, and the higher the level of air pollution, the greater the effect,” the researchers said. Professor Kazem Rahimi (cardiovascular medicine) of Oxford University, who led the study, said, “We couldn’t find a noise threshold for exactly how much the risk increases, but the association between the higher the noise level and the higher the risk was clear.”

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), an estimated 1.25 billion adults worldwide suffer from high blood pressure. High blood pressure is a factor that increases the risk of heart disease and stroke. Other factors besides blood pressure include age, genetics, obesity, diet, and physical activity.

The paper can be found at the following link (https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacadv.2023.100262).