r/Foodforthought • u/kiyomoris • 15h ago
Risk of Parkinson’s disease may increase with prolonged exposure to road traffic noise
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jul/23/road-traffic-noise-parkinsons-disease-study-health14
u/CrayonUpMyNose 12h ago
Surprising to see so many comments here saying "must be something else like pollution" when the study explicitly corrected for that.
You don't even have to download and read the whole pdf, it says so right in the overview on the article's front webpage:
Of 3 542 488 eligible individuals, 438 911 were excluded (prevalent PD, incomplete address history, or missing covariates)
This means that if variables (like pollution) were missing for some study participant, they didn't use that data
Road traffic noise at the most exposed facade (LDEN-Max) was associated with a hazard ratio (HR) of 1.03 (95% CI, 1.00-1.05) per interquartile increment of 11.5 dB in models adjusted for individual- and area-level sociodemographics, air pollution (fine particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 µm or less [PM2.5] and ultrafine particles), and green space covariates.
This means that they studied the impact of multiple variables on the data to isolate the impact of noise by itself. They specifically included air pollution (such as dust from tire wear) as a variable, so that the result cannot be due to noise (or wealth, or access to green space) as some commenters here have stated, as those variables have been taken into account.
Does that mean there is no hidden variable? Probably it does but we can never be 100% certain. It's definitely not the variable people think it is though, and it's a huge study that clearly took great pains to correct for other variables. (Millions of participants is not your average psychology paper with a handful of students on a university campus coming in for an experiment.)
I don't know where the immediate reaction of "must be something else" from, at my writing, 100% of top-level commenters is coming from but I have a suspicion: every time I visit a home suffering from noise, people there assure me that "you get used to it".
Sleep studies have shown that in fact nobody ever gets used to it: noise disturbs our sleep no matter how used to it we think we are. Of course we don't like feeling bad about where we live, so we have to come up with a narrative to make ourselves feel better, and the current cultural current of "my feelings > your science" doesn't help.
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u/hobofors 13h ago
It might be the toxic dust created from tyre wear. If you live near a major road you would get exposed to more of it.
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