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
Not sure what that has to do with the import of this study but it is an interesting factoid.
Given the great variety of factors contributing to depression, I'm not sure that there are any studies which would attempt to isolate smoking cessation's contribution to a supposed resulting increas in depression.
In any case, Cognitive Behavior Therapy has been demonstrated to be quite effective with most depressions. Of course, that presumes that the individuals concerned are willing and open to changing the way they think.
I think the smoking threads hereon would indicate that the population of smokers is chronically addicted to the way they think; stubbornly, narrowly, rigidly immune to any evidence suggesting that the way they think about smoking is dysfunctional and not factually based . . . etc. etc. etc.
CHEMICALS ARE IRRITANTS
Can you identify anything coursing through your body right now that is not a chemical?
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These threads are always such abundant demonstrations of rampant raging non sequiters.
Hello?
Is that a presumption that I am irrational enough to accept that statement as a justification for being thrilled about the destructive-to-breathing-and-life chemicals second hand smoke floods my relative's unborn baby's blood and lungs with?
From my construction on reality, THAT would not be very good reality testing.
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.
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Excellent very factual statements. Therefore, they will be seen as outrageously inappropriate on a smoking thread.
I'm not a great fan of coerced legalized morality.
However, without it, we'd likely be having orgies in the park and probably are in many areas already. It will get worse.
Legislating morality is problematic. Still, at stoplights, I'm rather thankful for it.
Depends on the context(s) involved in terms of reference groups; larger group contexts; group politics involved etc.
In some respects, it might be a better 'survival thing' to encourage smokers to smoke like chimneys around their children. Should decrease their numbers by hastened deaths eventually.
But I really don't feel that way. I think the defenseless children deserve some champions.
It's all likely moot.
Given the looming wars . . . and as the GEORGIA GUIDE STONES illustrate so graphically . . . the puppet masters' plans to actively reduce the world's population to 500,000,000
. . . it's probably MORE likely that measures will be covertly taken to INCREASE cigarette's mortality effects than that they will be removed as a problem.
But that's not really the level of paranoia I choose to live at . . . as logical as it could be construed to be.
Spelling's never been a strength and I probably should use the spell checker more often but just hate to bother.
I agree in the sense that a lot of lawsuits should be thrown out of court; folks admonished to be more careful and take more personal responsibility. Life is hazardous. Death with the wrong heart attitudes and allegiances is even MORE so.
I fail to see how any such is justification for deliberately, callously, selfishly hazard an unborn's and/or young children's lifelong breathing capacities and their general health and longivity.
Of course, I realize that Selfishness, arrogance, rebellion are not usually ammenable to logic, raw facts or sensible love and caring.
There is something inherently humorous in "science by repetition or 'gut feeling'"
Anecdotal 'science' is an oxymoron.
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I fail to see how such truisms have a microgram of usefulness regarding this study.
Oh, that's right . . . as an off-the-wall rationalization.
Now I understand.
And silly me, I thought unborn children didn't use their lungs, so I'm kinda wonderin' how the smoke gets in there to damage 'em.
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I dare to assume that a scientific education would provide one with more than ample resources with which to understand that at least too much of too many of the carcinogens flooding into the mother's blood stream would get to cells in the baby via the blood stream.
Isn't science teaching about the blood system these days?
Isn't science teaching about cell walls and the various factors compromising health at the cellular levels these days?
Isn't science teaching about the greatly increased understanding we have these days about the various permeability factors of various chemicals etc. through various cell walls to the cells' detriment?
Or am I living in an alternate reality where "science" is all based on SELFISH BIASES, SELFISH ASSUMPTIONS, SELFISH RATIONALIZATIONS?
Were you aware that the phrase "Hard scientific facts" by itself is meaningless?
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I don't consider the hard scientific facts about the destructiveness of the second hand smoke chemicals on the cellular level of the lungs of the unborn and children to be meaningless.
Those facts are certainly NOT meaningless to THOSE children.
I realize some are trying to justify the saying or implication that those children's lives and the health of their lives are meaningless, worthless, inconsequential considerations.
But that's far, far, far from my perspective and far from the perspectives of anyone I know who cherishes life beyond their own.
I'm afraid that using the word "carcinogen", without a context, is just posturing and demagoguering.
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Perhaps the SIMPLE SOLID FACT was missed that
the context
is unborn children and young children in the presence of second hand smoke . . . and the context of their lung cells coping with the onslaught of the resulting destructive chemicals and compounds originating in that second hand smoke.
I didn't realize that was a difficult context to grasp.
Excellent, very creative, clever post.
Thanks.
Wonderful.
Congrats.
Given all the givens, evidently the scientific study backing up this "Most" will be posted shortly on this thread.
A really really really really simple example for the dogmatic and reason-challenged out there:
If you take five individuals, and four of them live to be 60, and the fourth dies at childbirth, the "average" longevity of the group is 48 years. A 20% reduction in the lifespan of all the survivors. Statistically useful but not particularly informative.
We won't even get into why or how, of the ducumented 10 people who lived to over 105, 9 of them smoked until age 95.
I am beginning to think that smokers are as addicted to non-secuiters as much as they are to cigarettes!
Amazing.
It must be so nice to go through life with the idea of controlling the lives of others.
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I have an incapacity to read that statement as anything other than
a glaring, raging, extreme, outrageous declaration of HYPOCRISY.
Smokers hereon seem to gleefully justify and wallow in the fun of CONTROLLING THE OXYGEN UPTAKE percentages of the defenseless unborn and young children.
Yet they want me to believe that they are against controlling the lives of others. LOL.
I don't think I've been that stupid for a very long time.
Dennis Miller did a rant on smoking on his show a
few years back.
"Of course it causes cancer,...of course it causes
emphysema...ITS F#%KING SMOKE"!!!!!
"WOULD YOU STAND OVER A BONFIRE AND INHALE EVERY
FIVE SECONDS!!!...NO!!!
Kind of sums it up for me.
But... that's just my opinion,....I could be wrong.
THANKS. FANTASTIC LISTS. MUCH APPRECIATED.
However, I hope it's realized that smokers are not particularly interested in facts.
They just want to go on freely controlling how much oxygen defenseless unborn children and other children can utilize in their compromised lungs and bodies.
Ain't free wheeling selfishness beautiful?
/sar
Interestingly, I wonder how many smokers' behaviors the solid full studies would influence.
Judging by the available evidence and inferrences on these threads . . .
I'd guesstimate few, little to nil on the vast majority.
Because the most heartfelt issue on the other side is not facts . . .
"But doing whatever the blazes selfish thing I want, when I want, how I want to whatever scr*wed up consequences without any accountability or responsibility falling on my well earned shoulders at all, ever, to any degree. "
Very impressive, that.
I'm not overly impressed with studies on smoking from China.
Love living there and love the people intensely.
But nonsmokers in the cities are incredibly compromised lung-wise. The soot from the coal bricks used in cooking etc. is thick in the air. Blow one's nose and the tissue is coal black.
On top of that . . . bureaucrats are known for twisting realities to suit whatever they think their boss wants.
But, hey, I'm confident that smokers will not be the least bit bothered by twisted facts on the consequences of second hand smoke.
Control away on those kids lungs!
/sar
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