The effect of infrasound and negative expectations to adverse pathological symptoms from wind farms

Abstract

An investigation was conducted on the effect of reported pathological symptoms of simulated infrasound produced by wind turbines. There is ongoing debate in the scientific community concerning the cause of the negative health effects reported by people living near wind farms, whether those effects are caused by the infrasound itself, or alternatively by a psychogenic response (such as a nocebo effect) to a presumption that the infrasound is the cause. In this study, a simulated wind turbine infrasound pressure waveform was generated using a custom-built headphone apparatus. Volunteers were influenced into states of high expectancy of negative effects from infrasound, and low expectancy of negative effects and their reactions to either infrasound or a sham noise were recorded. It was found, at least for the short-term exposure times conducted here-in, that the simulated infrasound has no statistically significant effect on the symptoms reported by volunteers, but the prior concern volunteers had about the effect of infrasound has a statistically significant influence on the symptoms reported. This supports the nocebo effect hypothesis.