Pregnancy exposure to wind turbine noise and adverse birth outcomes: a nationwide cohort study.

Pregnancy exposure to wind turbine noise and adverse birth outcomes: a nationwide cohort study. Environ Res. 2018 Sep 10;: Authors: Poulsen AH, Raaschou-Nielsen O, Peña A, Hahmann AN, Nordsborg RB, Ketzel M, Brandt J, Sørensen M Abstract Noise from wind turbines (WTs) is reported as more annoying than traffic noise at similar levels, raising concerns as to whether WT noise (WTN) may negatively affect health, as reported for traffic noise. We aimed to investigate whether residential WTN is associated with adverse birth outcomes. Based on national registries, we identified all Danish dwellings situated within ≤ 20 wt heights radius and a random selection of 25% of dwellings situated within 20-40 wt heights radius of a WT. We identified 135,795 pregnant women living in the dwellings from 1982 to 2013, and collected information on gestational age and birth weight from a national birth registry. Using data on WT type and simulated hourly wind at each WT, we estimated hourly outdoor and low frequency (LF) indoor WTN at the dwellings of the pregnant women and aggregated as mean nighttime WTN during pregnancy. We used logistic regression with adjustment for individual and area-level covariates for the analyses. We did not find evidence suggesting that mean pregnancy or trimester-specific exposure to outdoor or indoor LF WTN were associated with any of the three adverse birth outcomes investigated: preterm birth (n = 13,003), te...
Source: Environmental Research - Category: Environmental Health Authors: Tags: Environ Res Source Type: research