Effects of exposure to traffic noise on health

Traffic noise cause adverse effects on health and quality of life of population exposed to it, including annoyance, sleep disturbance, decreased performance at school/work, stress, hypertension, and ischemic heart disease. Despite of that, there is still a lack of standards on regulations/policies regarding noise in urban environments.
In Australia, there are many discrepancies in thresholds, regulations, and policies with regard to noise levels when states and regions are compared. Currently Victoria has day-to-night threshold for noise level high above the accepted levels in Europe, and they are incomplete, since there is no standard for the late night period.
A better understanding of the effects of noise on health for the Australian situation is necessary for developing more informed and unified policy for traffic noise management. This paper reviews existing literature, evidence and policies related to urban noise, and combines them to a case study of mapping noise and population exposure levels.