Mum's the word for better health

If you and your family are looking forward to a 4^th of July weekend full of fireworks and patriotic marching bands, here's something you should hear.

The sounds of celebrating can hurt not only your ears, but your overall health as well.

In the loudest parts of the U.S., reducing hazardous noise levels - a risk factor for high blood pressure and heart disease - could save more than $3 billion annually, according to a new economic assessment.
"A lot of work is done on air pollution and the public health burden, but noise just never seems to get the same consideration," said senior author Richard L. Neitzel of the University of Michigan School of Public Health in Ann Arbor in an interview with the Reuters news agency.
High noise levels have been tied to poor health outcomes including heart disease, possibly because sleep disturbances cause stress and interrupt body cycles, he told Reuters.

"These are crude estimates of what could be the savings if we reduced exposures to this very common thing," he said.
The average decibel level for many firecrackers and those gun salutes you'll hear on Saturday are around 150 decibels.

The World Health Organisation suggests that impulse noises should be not more than 140 decibels peak at the ear.

Meanwhile, marching band members are often exposed to sound levels of more than 100 decibels, while 120 decibels is actually considered the threshold of pain. At that intensity, unprotected ears can be damaged in just 15 minutes, according to OSHA.

Some college marching bands around the country, like Duke, now wear earplugs, but how about the people listening to them.

In 1974, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recommended an average 24-hour exposure limit of 55 weighted decibels, with nighttime noise weighted more heavily due to sleep disturbance, and the agency last assessed exposure above those levels in 1981.
For the new estimate, the researchers assumed the proportion of the U.S. population exposed to high levels of noise was the same in 2013 as estimated in 1981. Given that the country has further urbanized over the last 30 years, that is likely an underestimate, Neitzel said.
Nevertheless, he and his coauthors assumed 46.2 percent of Americans, or 145.5 million, were exposed to at least 58 decibels and 13.9 percent, or 43.8 million, were exposed to at least 65 decibels per day in 2013.
Using previous estimates, the researchers assumed that the risk of hypertension or coronary heart disease increases by seven to 17 percent per 10 decibels of increased noise exposure.
Hypertension and cardiovascular disease account for 15 percent of U.S. health expenditures, or about $324 billion per year. One-third of U.S. adults have high blood pressure, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As a result, the researchers suggest that reducing daily noise levels by five decibels would reduce the number of people in the U.S. with hypertension by 1.4 percent and those with coronary heart disease by 1.8 percent. That would correspond to a savings of $3.9 billion annually, as reported in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
"This again raises awareness that noise is actually a very important exposure," said Dr. Mathias Basner, assistant professor of Sleep and Chronobiology in Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia.
"Most people know that if it is too loud that can damage your hearing, but many people don't know that noise has non-auditory effects," Basner, who was not involved in the new study, told Reuters Health.
In addition to hearing damage and cardiovascular risk, high noise levels may also have cognitive effects for children, he said.