Overview of research into sleep disturbance due to noise in the last three years

摘要

It is well established that noise can disturb sleep and if this disturbance is severe and frequent enough it can lead to significant fragmentation and sleep deprivation which seriously affects our physical and mental health. In the early days of modern sleep research there was a considerable emphasis on understanding the importance of the type and structure of sleep in terms of its electro-physiologically defined sleep stages and the nature of recovery sleep following sleep deprivation (Dement & Greenberg 1966). However, it is unclear how the well documented deleterious effects of these early sleep deprivation studies can be applied to environmental noise disturbed sleep (Zaharna & Guilleminault 2010) as the typical level of environmental noise is usually not severe enough to produce the same degree of sleep deprivation and/or fragmentation as the early experimental studies were designed to provoke significant outcomes.