Questions of the NORAH study

How much do residents feel disturbed by traffic noise? How does it affect their quality of life? What kind of noise is most disturbing: road, rail or air traffic noise? How does the annoyance change when aircraft noise increases or reduces due to changes of flight operation? Do people in the Frankfurt area react to noise the same way or differently from, e.g. those near the airports of Cologne/Bonn or Stuttgart? In addition to answering these and some other questions, the annoyance study aimed to update so-called annoyance curves. They can be used to read the degree of annoyance and disturbance depending on the noise load. They play an important role in making decisions on noise protection measures.

How much does chronic traffic noise affect the health of the adult residents of the Rhine-Main area? The focus was on various cardiovascular diseases, depression and breast cancer. For these, NORAH aimed to determine the connection between noise and health risk as precisely as possible, in the form of so-called exposure–risk relationships.

The sleep study aimed to find out how introduction of the core resting time between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. in 2011 affected the sleep of the residents near the Frankfurt airport. Another aim was to examine whether the results of sleep studies at the airport Cologne/Bonn from 2001/2002, which are currently used for the Frankfurt night index, differ from the current results in the Frankfurt area.

Noise can cause stress. Stress will increase bloopressure in the short term – this is the starting thesis of the study. How does blood pressure react to chronic traffic noise, however? Do the residents of the Frankfurt airport area show effects that cannot be explained by typical risk factors such as age, smoking or overweight, but that are connected to noise level?

Do primary school children learn to read more slowly when they are going to school or living in areas strongly exposed to aircraft noise? How does noise affect their quality of life? Again, the aim was to determine the exposure–effect curves – in this case for children.