Study Shows How Secondhand Smoke Injures Babies' Lungs

UC Davis ^ | 08/15/06 | UC Davis

[Moonman62]

UC Davis researchers today described in unprecedented biochemical and anatomical detail how cigarette smoke damages the lungs of unborn and newborn children.

The findings illustrate with increased urgency the dangers that smokers' families and friends face, said UC Davis Professor Kent Pinkerton, and should give family doctors helpful new insight into the precise hidden physical changes occurring in their young patients' lungs.

"Smoke exposure causes significant damage and lasting consequences in newborns," Pinkerton said. "This research has a message for every parent: Do not smoke or breathe secondhand smoke while you are pregnant. Do not let your children breathe secondhand smoke after they are born."

Pinkerton added that the results from this study are further proof that secondhand smoke's effects on children are not minor, temporary or reversible. "This is the missed message about secondhand smoke and children," he said. "Parents need to understand that these effects will not go away. If children do not grow healthy lungs when they are supposed to, they will likely never recover. The process is not forgiving and the children are not going to be able to make up this loss later in life."

The 2006 Surgeon General's Report on secondhand smoke estimates that more than 126 million residents of the United States age 3 or older are exposed to secondhand smoke. Among children younger than 18 years of age, an estimated 22 percent are exposed to secondhand smoke in their home; estimates range from 11.7 percent in Utah to 34.2 percent in Kentucky.

To get the word out to parents about the dangers of secondhand smoke, two states (Arkansas and Louisiana) have made it illegal to smoke in a car with young passengers. In California, a similar bill, AB 379, is currently under consideration in the state Legislature.

The new UC Davis research is reported in today's issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. The lead author is Cai-Yun Zhong, a former UC Davis graduate student now working at ArQule Biomedical Institute in Boston; the co-authors are Ya Mei Zhou, also a former UC Davis graduate student and now investigating breast cancer signaling pathways at Buck Research Institute in Novato, Calif.; Jesse Joad, a UC Davis pediatrician who studies children's lung development and cares for sick children in the UC Davis Health System; and Pinkerton, a UC Davis professor of pediatric medicine and director of the UC Davis Center for Health and the Environment.

The Pinkerton research group is one of the few groups in the nation capable of studying the effects of environmental contaminants on unborn and newborn animals. Their 15 years of studies on mice and rats have yielded greater understanding of how air pollution affects human lungs and health through experiments that attempt to reproduce true exposure conditions to environmental air pollutants.

The new study was done with rhesus macaque monkeys, in order to obtain the best possible understanding of what happens in people. Pregnant macaques were exposed to smoke levels equal to those that a pregnant woman would breathe if someone in her home or workplace smoked. Newborn macaques were exposed to secondhand smoke levels similar to those a human baby would breathe if it was cared for by a moderate-to-heavy smoker.

What the researchers found is that environmental tobacco smoke wreaks havoc in babies at a critical time in the development of lungs -- when millions of tiny cells called alveoli (pronounced al-VEE-o-lye) are being formed.

Alveoli are the place where oxygen passes from the lungs into the bloodstream. Human infants are born with only about one-fifth of the 300 million alveoli they will need as adults. They construct almost all those 300 million alveoli between birth and age 8.

Pinkerton's group had previously shown that rats exposed to secondhand smoke while in the womb and after birth developed hyper-reactive, or "ticklish," airways, which typically occurs in children and adults with asthma. The airways in those rodents remained hyper-reactive even when the secondhand smoke exposure stopped. Thus, this early exposure to environmental tobacco smoke created a long-lasting and perhaps permanent asthma-like condition.

In the new study, the researchers analyzed step-by-step how the alveolar cells' inner workings reacted to cigarette smoke. They found the normal orderly process of cell housecleaning had gone haywire.

In healthy people, cells live and die on a schedule. Programmed cell death, called apoptosis (a-pop-TOE-sis), is regulated by genes that increase or decrease various chemical reactions in the cell.

But in this study, when baby monkeys were exposed to cigarette smoke before and after birth, apoptosis went awry. Critical cellular controls regulating cell death turned off. Alveolar cells died twice as fast as they should have.

"If you are killing cells at a higher rate during a critical developmental stage, when they are supposed to be proliferating in order to create new alveoli, the lungs may never be able to recover," Pinkerton said.

Funding for the study, "Environmental Tobacco Smoke Suppresses Nuclear Factor Kappa B Signaling to Increase Apoptosis in Infant Monkey Lungs," was included in a five-year, $1.5 million research grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and $450,000 from taxes on sales of tobacco products in California.

Media contact(s): • Kent Pinkerton, Center for Health and the Environment, (530) 752-8334, kepinkerton@ucdavis.edu • Jesse Joad, Department of Pediatrics, (916) 734-3189, jpjoad@ucdavis.edu • Sylvia Wright, UC Davis News Service, (530) 752-7704, swright@ucdavis.edu

[RightWhale]

Mammal bodies have a myriad of a diversity of types of cells

Perhaps 10% of the cells in your body are actually you. The rest are other creatures along for the ride.

[Quix]

Proves nothing.
= = = =

Actually, to me,

DENIAL OF HARD FACT SCIENCE FINDINGS AND PRINCIPLES

PROVES NOTHING.

[aft_lizard]

Midichlorians?

[Old Professer]

In the mid 1950s in the western world, close to half the adult males were active smokers which begs the inference that the other half, along with the children were passive smokers.

Today less than 25% of adults worldwide are active smokers and, according to this report, in the U.S. over 35% are passive smokers.

If we assume these numbers to be so and we lower the active smoker rate to 10% we will still have a passive rate of nearly 30%.

This research will never end until the active rate is zero if it is the passive group we wish to protect.

[Old Professer]

Yes, it mimics nicotine's effect on the pleasure center.

[CSM]

"God alone has complete knowledge about all the perspectivs, facts,..."

Are you God?

[Old Professer]

Another interesting factoid is that chronic and clinical depression is at an all-time high presently and inversely correlates with smoking cessation.

[tacticalogic]

CHEMICALS ARE IRRITANTS

Can you identify anything coursing through your body right now that is not a chemical?

[chemicalman]

Smoking just not healthy since the companies started removing the chemicals from the tobacco.

[Just another Joe]

It shouldn't cost you anything to ask valid questions.

To have those 'valid questions' to ask I would have to see the study, now wouldn't I? And they aren't going to give me a free copy of the study.

Tell them you are a member of the media representing FreeRepublic.com.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, that would scare them off REAL good. They'd think the pajamahadeen were after them.

Sorry, Moonman, any study that has already been paid for that I can't get, at least, a decent synopsis for free is suspect, imo.

I've looked all over the web and there isn't even a decent synopsis of this study anywhere.
What I posted before is from the only synopsis I could find and it isn't up to par with, almost, anything else I've looked at.

[Moonman62]

Is the nicotine concentration in tomatoes high enough for them to be used as a smoking cessation product?

[Gabz]

My point being not all of these "studies" have no agenda behind them. In trying to prove smoking causes cervical cancer it was determined it doesn't, yet they continue to claim it does.

A vaccine for HPV has been developed, a vaccine that cuold go a long way in preventing cervical cancer...........but instead of getting information out about that, the anti-smoker agenda driven medical community continues to claim smoking causes cervical cancer. They are wasting money on propaganda rather than getting proper information out about this vaccine and the primary cause of cervical cancer.

[Vor Lady]

Smoking Ping.

[RightWhale]

I don't know my parasites and symbionts all that well, but 'Alien' the movie comes to mind.

[Sail The Blue Sea]

Of course smoking while pregnant is harmful. Some women do it to insure a low birth weight.

The internal effects of smoking are well known. While pregnant you are inducing carcinogens directly into the mother and therefore the child's bloodstream. It's poison, none of it is good.

As the baby is developing their tiny lungs, inhaling smoke is also inhibiting growth. Why would any parent who loves their child want to inhibit the lungs of their precious babies?

As the child is growing not only is it witnessing and surrounded by a deadly and filthy habit, but their homes and vehicles are covered in tar. No one can be so stupid as to think that smoke is innocuous. Even in cars which smokers always claim to have the windows open the roof lining will be filthy and a film of tar will cover their windows.

This isn't rocket science. Without going into the intricate physiology of all the disease smoking causes, when you look around at the filth you know that not only will it be in your home and car, but it enters your child's lungs.

[tacticalogic]

Specifically, how does this study protect life?

It doesn't, but it will be used as a club to demand we heap yet another abuse on the Commerce Clause which we'll be told will do that.

[Sail The Blue Sea]

Of course smoking while pregnant is harmful. Some women do it to insure a low birth weight.

The internal effects of smoking are well known. While pregnant you are inducing carcinogens directly into the mother and therefore the child's bloodstream. It's poison, none of it is good.

As the baby is developing their tiny lungs, inhaling smoke is also inhibiting growth. Why would any parent who loves their child want to inhibit the lungs of their precious babies?

As the child is growing not only is it witnessing and surrounded by a deadly and filthy habit, but their homes and vehicles are covered in tar. No one can be so stupid as to think that smoke is innocuous. Even in cars which smokers always claim to have the windows open the roof lining will be filthy and a film of tar will cover their windows.

This isn't rocket science. Without going into the intricate physiology of all the disease smoking causes, when you look around at the filth you know that not only will it be in your home and car, but it enters your child's lungs.

[Trailerpark Badass]

According to these people, I should be dead.

[Old Professer]

The gist of this report is that the babies deep lung sacs aren't completely developed until about the age of eight years; if society were to raise its children in a smoke-free environment until age eight and then turn them back over to their parents, the outcome would be greatly improved.

Of course, sequestering the mother during her pregnancy would better assure success if raising perfect children is the proper role of society.

[aft_lizard]

I agree, but we have to be careful as to not get into the habit of tossing out every study whether its advocacy or not in the hunt for true science, chances are every study has a advocate behind it..the government, special interests, big pharm, etc.