Posted on 08/16/2006 8:25:06 AM PDT by 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
Junk Science all funded by the Anti Smoking Front of the Democratic Party!
I will never know.
I don't allow second hand tomato thingies in my house.
AND THAT'S A FACT!
I apologize for my post -- it fails to contain any studies published in the last two years. If you'd like, I'd be happy to compile an additional, supplemental bibliography, including the study referenced in this news article. But before I do that, I'd be interested in rebuttals to the 708 independent studies I've already listed. In addition, if you lack ready access to scientific journals, I'll be happy to post their full text. My only worry is that their combined length -- at approximately 20,000 pages (not including photos and diagrams) -- might overwhelm users with dialup connections.
LOL!
He identified dozens of common foods that we eat every day that have much higher natural concentrations of scare-tactics 'carcinogens' than the levels that cause "activists" to wet their panties.
That's a bizarrely selective listing of study findings. Why not use the results from the full list of 708 studies I cited?
The reality that you have thrown out is that any study that would use an age average would automatically toss out and explain any age that would seem to fall out of the group norm, or in fact the study would not even use that data and would create a seperate study to determine why there was this anomaly in the study. Using an EXTREME example of a non realistic average is not scientific at all.
Really and these identified foods, we eat them everyday throughout the day constantly for 40 years with hardly a break except for bedtime? And do these foods have hundreds of unnatural chemicals? Are they directly entering the bloodstream through the lungs or are they processed through the digestive system where the majority of chemicals they would contain would be harmlessly passed while the good stuff remains?
Bizarrely selective? Not at all.
It may not fit your notion of what a study should say about ETS but it's not bizarrely selective at all.
As for a rebuttal on all 708 studies you posted, that's gonna take a while. You sure you have the time to wait that long?
Why not pull up the relative risk numbers yourself and see how many show between 2.00 and 3.00?
As for this particular study, if you would care to post, or FReepmail me, the actual study, I would be appreciative.
Your post reminds me of the old lawyer joke: I you can't overwhelm them with facts, dazzle 'em with bu*****t!
Incidentally, I wonder how many $billions of taxpayer and foundation money that list represents?
As far as I can tell, the results of all that activity and fury is not, "outlaw tobacco!", a reasonable response to the "disaster"..
Instead, it is "Let's tax the smoker, then criminalize his behavior, so as to tax him some more."
Why do I just know that makes total sense to you?
I would be ecstatic with just one study, including appendices, bibliography and references.
The one that is the subject of this thread.
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.
These are rather vague factors that could be easily distorted by an anti-smoking scientist, or a pro-smoking scientist for that matter.
For example: How many cigarettes were smoked each day, and how far away was the baby monkey?
Was the baby monkey forced to inhale smoke blown directly in its face? All day? Twenty-two hours a day? One hour a day?
Was there only one room in the monkey's house?
I find it hard to believe that second hand smoke is that much more dangerous than say, a diesel-fueled public bus driving past a house (containing a baby) every hour on the hour.
Or a house located next to an Interstate highway.
Or a house in which people cook and perhaps burn their food on a regular basis.
Or a family which barbeque's dinner every night.
Or one of a thousand other factors which could be antedoctally used to infer danger.
Actually, I just realized that that study is not in the public domain, and I don't want to expose FR to copyright liability. You can access it here.
God alone has complete knowledge about all the perspectivs, facts, pseudo facts, deceptions, disinformation, secrets, manipulations, tyrannies etc. afoot in the world. But it's fun to collect puzzle pieces and discuss them with other folk of reasonably fair mindedness.
From your post:
DENIAL IS NOT A GOOD SURVIVAL HABIT.
Neither is the assumption of God's role as arbitor of fact. You have not debated anything, but rather harangued anyone who didn't completely accept the conclusions of the article wholesale.
As I said before, if the study has ALREADY been paid it should be available for free.
I won't personally send money to people that do advocacy science.
It'll be available for free if you wait a year. But you haven't read the 708 free studies I already cited, so I doubt you'll read this either.
And where do I find these 708 studies? You didn't give the actual study names and when I try to follow the links at the left it gives me a server error.
The links are broken, but I gave you study names, journal names, authors, page and volume numbers and dates. Anybody with the most basic library skills should have all the information they need to read every single one of those studies. If not, ask your local librarian for assistance.
The 708 studies here are all peer reviewed and have been published in reputable medical and scientific journals. Many, if not most, are independent, randomly-selected double-blind studies with impeccable research methodology. Moreover, they have been cited by the US National Institutes of Health, the American Medical Association, the Office of the US Surgeon General, the US National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, The American Cancer Society, The National Academies of Science, The White House, and other such disreputable purveyors of bu*****t.
Now if you have specific concerns with any study listed, let's hear it. But I'm tired of hearing pro-smoking drones go on about a lack of evidence tying second (and even first!) hand smoke to health.
If you don't like people smoking, maybe you could just not go where they're doing it.
Try it. It works for me.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.