RANCH Project Background & Aims

· Research suggests that children may be a high-risk group vulnerable to the effects of noise. Previous studies have found associations between exposure to aircraft noise and children's reading comprehension and long-term memory. Associations have also been found between aircraft noise exposure and annoyance, but evidence of associations with raised blood pressure, mental health and sleep are weaker.

· Most previous studies in children have focussed on aircraft noise rather than road traffic noise and have not examined either exposure-effect relationships or the effects of exposure to more than one source of noise. Exposure-effect relationships, that show increasing effects on health/cognition with greater exposure to noise, are an important step in confirming causal associations between noise and child health outcomes.

· The RANCH project, the largest study of noise and children's health to date, examined exposure-effect relationships between chronic aircraft noise exposure, chronic road traffic noise exposure and combinations of aircraft noise and road traffic noise exposure at school and cognitive and health outcomes in three European countries; the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom. This enabled the relationship between noise and children's cognition and health to be examined across countries, taking into account variation in noise exposure and also social, cultural and climatic variation.

· The RANCH project has also included studies of road traffic noise at home and sleep in Sweden and studies of soundscapes in the UK and Sweden.

· The project aims to provide a robust evidence base to inform pan-European policy based on health effects in children.