All that traffic noise near your home isn't just annoying -- it could also raise your risk of having a heart attack.
A new study in the journal PLoS ONE shows that, specifically, every additional 10 decibels of noise from traffic noise is linked with a 12 percent increased risk of a heart attack.
The study results are based on the health and residential data of more than 50,000 people who live in Denmark.
The researchers speculated that the heart attack risk might be due to the fact that traffic noise can disturb sleep and increase stress levels in people constantly exposed to it.
"You might wake up thinking that you had a quiet night, but when you look at it in a lab, you see that your sleep stages have been disturbed," study researcher Mette Sorenson of the Danish Cancer Society told MSNBC.
Similarly, a study published earlier this year in the journal Circulation suggested that people who have survived a heart attack are more likely to die over a 10-year period the closer they live to a major road, MyHealthNewsDaily reported.
Specifically, people who'd had a heart attack who lived 300 feet away from a major road had a 27 percent increased risk of death, while the risk was 13 percent higher for people living 650 to 3,200 feet away, according to MyHealthNewsDaily.