Posted on 12/22/2003 9:27:45 AM PST by chance33_98
Univ. of Minn. Study 1st to Detect Tobacco-Specific Carcinogens in Nonsmokers in Public Setting; Environmental Tobacco Smoke Significantly Affects Nonsmokers
12/22/03 7:00:00 AM
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To: National Desk, Medical Reporter
Contact: Brenda Hudson of the University of Minnesota's Academic Health Center, 612-624-5680
MINNEAPOLIS, Dec. 22 /U.S. Newswire/ -- University of Minnesota researchers found that levels of a tobacco-specific lung carcinogen increased in nonsmokers when they visited a public setting where smoking is allowed. The carcinogens, metabolites of NNK, could increase their risk of lung cancer. The study is published Dec. 22 by the American Association for Cancer Research.
This study is the first to measure tobacco-specific carcinogens in nonsmokers exposed to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) in a public setting, in this case a casino. (A previous study by the University of Minnesota examined tobacco carcinogens in nonsmoking women who were exposed to secondhand smoke at home.)
"Environmental tobacco smoke in restaurants, bars, and casinos presents a potential health hazard to employees and non-smoking patrons," said lead author Kristin Anderson, Ph.D., associate professor in the School of Public Health and Cancer Center member. "However, further studies are needed to examine the long-term health effects, on employees and patrons, of transient exposure to ETS."
Biomarkers were measured in urine samples from nonsmokers before and after a four-hour visit to a casino where smoking is allowed. The researchers tested for NNK through its urinary metabolites, NNAL and NNAL-Gluc, which are excellent biomarkers of human uptake of NNK. NNAL, like NNK, is a potent pulmonary (lung) carcinogen in rodents and a probable human carcinogen. The study found that, on average, the levels of NNK metabolites were increased two-fold (112 percent), demonstrating that exposure of nonsmokers to ETS in a public setting results in uptake of a tobacco-specific lung carcinogen.
Co-author Stephen Hecht, Ph.D., Cancer Center member and professor of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology in the Medical School, previously identified the lung carcinogen, NNK, and its metabolites NNAL and NNAL-Gluc, as tobacco-specific compounds. "There are no known sources of NNAL and NNAL-Gluc in human urine other than exposure to tobacco products," he said.
Eighteen individuals participated in the study, 14 females and 4 males. The average time spent at the casino was 4.25 hours. Participants reported that nearly all of their time was spent in the designated smoking areas. The nonsmoking area was contiguous with smoking areas. Before visiting the casino, levels of NNAL were below of the limit of detection in eleven participants. Three of these participants also had NNAL levels below the limit of detection in the after-visit samples; all others were in the detectable range.
The article is published in the journal "Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers and Prevention."
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The Academic Health Center is home to the University of Minnesota's seven health professional schools and colleges as well as several health-related centers and institutes, including the School of Public Health and The Cancer Center. Founded in 1851, the university is one of the oldest and largest land grant institutions in the country. The AHC prepares the new health professionals who improve the health of communities, discover and deliver new treatments and cures, and strengthen the vitality of the health economy.
The Cancer Center at the University of Minnesota is a National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center. Awarded more than $80 million in peer-reviewed grants during fiscal year 2003, the Cancer Center conducts cancer research that advances knowledge and enhances care. The center also engages community outreach and public education efforts addressing cancer. To learn more about cancer, visit the University of Minnesota Cancer Center Web site at http://www.cancer.umn.edu. For cancer questions, call the Cancer Center information line at 1-888-CANCER MN (1-888-226-2376) or 612-624-2620 in the metro area.
A very small sampling, a very short time, and a bunch of could/might/more study needed sound bites to key on.
Until I can see the study and the data this is no more than a sound bite on an anti's record.
Try "Niconazis propaganda." It should be there somewhere.
What is the level of NNK detected compared with the level necessary to cause harm? I couldn't find that in the article (though I didn't look very hard...).
Don't feel bad. I couldn't even find the study the article claims to quote.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
www.rwjf.org
RWJF funds TTURC study dissemination and policy research and analysis to policy makers, the public, and the media.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse
www.nida.nih.gov
NIDA is a major funder of the TTURCs whose mission is to lead the Nation in bringing the power of science to bear on drug abuse and addiction.
The National Cancer Institute
www.nci.nih.gov
The National Cancer Institute is a major funder of the TTURCs whose goal is to stimulate and support scientific discovery and its application to achieve a future when all cancers are uncommon and easily treated.
How about, "I can't find the science."
Evidence mounts against secondhand smoke
Fully half of the article is devoted to a work done by California EPA.
A second, unrelated study, also published today, highlights one of those specific risks. The research, by the California Environmental Protection Agency, concludes that exposure to secondhand cigarette smoke can cause breast cancer, particularly in younger women. It is the first time this link has been made so directly. The report says that secondhand smoke can also cause lung cancer and heart disease, exacerbate asthma and bring on sudden infant death syndrome in babies and reproductive problems in adults.
The antis have been spouting this crapola for years and none of it has changed. Somebody must be threatening their funding and so they just rewrite previous discarded stuff and add a new headline.
So, the NNK levels DOUBLED, but from what I would assume is a NORMAL level.
What then is a abnormal level?
Or maybe this is like the arsenic "scare"?
To get the entire study you have to PAY!
If they don't want to show me the data then I suspect that it doesn't say what they want it to say.
Here's the abstract of the study.
A new method was developed for the analysis of metabolites of the tobacco-specific lung carcinogen 4-(methylnitrosamino)-1-(3-pyridyl)-1-butanone (NNK) in human urine. The metabolites are 4-(methylnitrosamino)-1-(3-pyridyl)-1-butanol (NNAL) and its glucuronides (NNAL-O-Gluc and NNAL-N-Gluc). The sum of these metabolites, total NNAL, was measured with this method. Urine was treated with ß-glucuronidase, which converts NNAL-O-Gluc and NNAL-N-Gluc to NNAL. After solvent partitioning and further purification on a liquid-liquid extraction cartridge and by high-performance liquid chromatography, total NNAL was quantified by gas chromatography with nitrosamine selective detection. The new method is accurate and precise, and the results are in good agreement with those obtained using the traditional method, which quantifies NNAL and its glucuronides separately. Levels of total NNAL ± SD (pmol/mg creatinine) were 2.60 ± 1.30 (n = 41) in smokers, 3.25 ± 1.77 (n = 55) in snuff-dippers, and 0.042 ± 0.020 (n = 18) in nonsmokers exposed to environmental tobacco smoke. The new method is faster and more sensitive than the traditional method and should greatly facilitate studies on human uptake of NNK.
And Kristin Anderson, who is quoted in the article as the lead author, isn't even listed on the study.
Makes you wonder what the agenda of the article is, doesn't it?
This is nothing new, They just keep doing the same study over and over again. And the stupid press just keeps reporting it as a new breakthrough.
Fox News reported on it 2½ years ago
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,1897,00.html
Secondhand Smokescreen
Wednesday, April 04, 2001
By Steven Milloy
Researchers reported this week that nonsmokers living with smokers are exposed to tobacco smoke. That's obviously not news. So that's not how the study was touted by the researchers and reported by the media.
"Study: Wives of smokers absorb cancer chemicals from smoke," alarmed an Associated Press headline.
Dr. Stephen Hecht and other University of Minnesota researchers compared urine samples from 23 women who lived with smokers with urine samples from 22 women who lived with nonsmokers.
Hecht reported that the women who lived with smokers had blood levels of two chemicals — NNAL and NNAL-Gluc — about five times higher than the women who lived with nonsmokers.
The chemicals are produced when the body metabolizes a chemical called NNK, a component of tobacco smoke. Laboratory experiments indicate that massive doses of NNK — on the order of the NNK exposure from smoking two packs of cigarettes per day for 40 years — increase lung cancer rates in rodents.
Based on finding the byproducts of NNK in the women exposed to secondhand smoke and NNK being associated with cancer in lab animals, Hecht concluded to the Associated Press, "A number of studies have shown a connection between environmental tobacco smoke and lung cancer. Our study provides the first biochemical support for this data."
If spin were science, Hecht would win a Nobel Prize.
Biochemistry aside, Hecht's grossly misrepresented the state of the science on secondhand smoke and lung cancer. A credible link between secondhand smoke and lung cancer remains elusive despite more than 40 published studies.
The largest-ever study on secondhand smoke and lung cancer, published in 1998 by the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer, reported no statistically significant increase in lung cancer risk associated with exposure to secondhand smoke.
That result was no surprise. It was the result the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency should have reported in its notorious 1993 secondhand smoke risk assessment — the study that greatly accelerated efforts to ban smoking in public places.
At the time of the EPA study, there were about 30 studies from around the world involving human populations exposed to secondhand smoke. Some studies reported weak statistical associations between exposure to secondhand smoke and lung cancer. The vast majority of studies reported no statistical association.
None of the studies were very good. All were statistical, not scientific in nature. All lacked data on how much secondhand smoke study subjects were exposed to.
But since the EPA already had pre-determined that secondhand smoke caused lung cancer — issuing guidelines for banning workplace smoking in 1989 — something had to be done to whip the science into shape.
The EPA statistically combined the results from the 11 published studies of U.S. populations. The agency hoped that statistical magic could be worked on the pooled results to produce the "correct" answer.
Alas, there was still no joy for the EPA. The statistical combination produced yet another a weak association between secondhand smoke and lung cancer. The association was not statistically significant, meaning that the agency could not rule out that the association occurred by chance.
More bad news arrived. Two more studies were published of U.S. populations exposed to secondhand smoke. Neither associated secondhand smoke with increased lung cancer risk.
Back to the drawing board in panic, the EPA brazenly abandoned standard statistical practices. The agency released a fudged result as its final product, concluding that secondhand smoke was a lung carcinogen that caused 3,000 deaths per year.
The tobacco industry challenged the EPA in court. A federal judge vacated the EPA's main conclusions stating that,"EPA disregarded information and made findings on selective information; ... deviated from its [standard procedures]; failed to disclose important findings and reasoning; and left significant questions without answers. EPA's conduct left substantial holes in the administrative records."
The ruling should have been a devastating blow to the hysteria surrounding secondhand smoke, except that it came more than five years after the EPA issued its report. The anti-tobacco industry exploited that time to convert the EPA's secondhand smoke junk science into conventional wisdom.
Now researchers like Hecht unabashedly cite the nonexistent EPA report to support the unsubstantiated assertion that secondhand smoke causes lung cancer.
Without the EPA report, after all, Hecht's new study is merely biochemical support that nonsmokers living with smokers are exposed to tobacco smoke.
Did taxpayer dollars need to be spent to prove that?
1) NNK is a Nitrosamine and we are exposed to Nitrosamines all the time in the environment. Mostly from foods we eat like bacon and cured meat and beer. Many foods like vegetables will even cause our own stomach to produce them. I would wonder how much of NNK metabolite NNAL is actually from the ETS and not other sources of Nitroamines that the participants could have been exposed to at the casino where this study took place.
2) But even if we take their numbers at face value.
Lets do the math
Quote from the study
"the levels of NNK metabolites(NNAL) were increased two-fold (112 percent)"
"Levels of total NNAL ± SD (pmol/mg creatinine) were 2.60 ± 1.30 (n = 41) in smokers, 3.25 ± 1.77 (n = 55) in snuff-dippers, and 0.042 ± 0.020 (n = 18) in nonsmokers exposed to environmental tobacco smoke."
0.042 ±0.020 is an increase 112% over the baseline in nonsmokers so assuming other nitrosamines aren't contaminating then ETS is responsible for 0.0235 ± 0.0112 and if 2.60 is normal for smokers than that would mean a nonsmoker only has 1/110 the levels of NNAL of a smoker. Assuming the average smoker smokes a pack a day that would mean they are exposed to the equivalent of ~1/6th of a cigarette. Whoopee doo!
3) NNK has never been shown to be cancerous in humans only in rodents at mega-doses equivalent to 2 packs a day for 40 years. Which would be equivalent to smoking 584,400 cigarettes at the same time!!!!!! Or about 3,506,400 times more the exposer the nonsmokers in this study received.
4) Humans and Mice (and I assume most life forms) have a nice enzyme 11-beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase which breaks down NNK, Which yeah it might have a hard time with 584,400 cigarettes worth of NNK all at once but it would have no problem with a 1/6th of a cigarette over 4½ hours like in this study.
5) This study isn't measuring NNK directly in your body/bloodstream, They are measuring it's breakdown product NNAL in the urine. So even if NNK is as dangerous as they claim the fact that the body converted it to NNAL and it's in the urine instead of the bloodstream shows your body has no problem dealing with and getting rid of it.
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