Prevalence of environmental annoyance in a Swedish and Finnish general population: Impact of everyday exposures on affect and behavior

We identified optimal cutoff scores for three questionnaire instruments that quantify environmental annoyance (affective reactions and behavioral disruptions) attributed to everyday environmental exposures of chemicals, electromagnetic fields and sounds, and applied these cutoff scores to estimate the prevalence of such reactions in two general populations. Data were used from 4941 participants from Swedish and Finnish population-based surveys. The identified optimal cutoff scores showed excellent diagnostic accuracy, and provided prevalence rates for these reactions of 28.8 and 27.0% for chemicals, 7.0 and 7.7% for electromagnetic fields, and 27.8 and 28.3% for sounds, for the Swedish and Finnish samples, respectively. The prevalence rates varied between age groups and sexes. The findings suggest that the cutoffs are useful for identifying individuals or groups with affective and behavioral reactions to everyday environmental exposures, and that the prevalence rate for these reactions vary depending on type of exposure, age and sex.