FIELD-STUDY OF SLEEP DISTURBANCE - EFFECTS OF AIRCRAFT NOISE AND OTHER FACTORS ON 5,742 NIGHTS OF ACTIMETRICALLY MONITORED SLEEP IN A LARGESUBJECT SAMPLE
Ja. Horne et al., FIELD-STUDY OF SLEEP DISTURBANCE - EFFECTS OF AIRCRAFT NOISE AND OTHER FACTORS ON 5,742 NIGHTS OF ACTIMETRICALLY MONITORED SLEEP IN A LARGESUBJECT SAMPLE, Sleep, 17(2), 1994, pp. 146-159
This field study assessed the effects of nighttime aircraft noise on a
ctimetrically measured sleep in 400 people (211 women and 189 men; 20-
70 years of age; one per household) habitually living at eight sites a
djacent to four U.K. airports, with different levels of night flying.
Subjects wore wrist-actimeters for 15 nights and completed morning sle
ep logs. A sample of 178 nights of sleep electroencephalograms (EEGs)
were recorded synchronously with actigrams. The EEG was used to develo
p filters for the raw actigrams, in order to: (1) estimate sleep onset
and (2) compare actigrams with aircraft noise events (ANEs). Actigram
s, filtered to detect the onset of discrete movements, were able to de
tect 88% of all EEG-determined periods of interim wakefulness of > 15
seconds and periods of movement time of >10 seconds. The main findings
were: (1) actimetry and self-reports showed that only a minority of A
NEs affected sleep, and, for most of our subjects, that domestic and i
diosyncratic factors had much greater effects; (2) despite large betwe
en-site variations in ANEs, the difference between sites in overall sl
eep disturbance was not significant; (3) there was a diminished actime
tric response to ANEs in the first hour of sleep and, apparently, also
in the last hour of sleep; and (4) men had significantly more discret
e movements than women and were more likely to respond to ANEs.