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

[Quix]

Grope, grope, grope.

Stretch, stretch, stretch.

Rationalize to beat the band!

It's the nature of smoke-in-hand!

Party on! Party on! It's our right!

To blazes with the off-spring. It's their night.

[Quix]

Oh really?

Not my construction on reality.

Thanks for the interpretation.

I think I have a file folder for it here somewhere . . .

[Quix]

I've never considered bronchitis to be a life enhancing, pleasure enhancing; life extending affliction.

Has always been very disconcerting at best and frightfully life threatening as it has transitioned into pneumonia many times.

But hey--I realize that forcing it on children unnecessarily--whether to their genetic predisposition to such hazards or the intensity of the 2nd hand smoke . . .

I realize that's just a benign freedom issue that adults who know better and who CONTROL THEIR oxygen uptake so emphatically--it's just a benign freedom issue of those selfish adults. So I shouldn't be concerned. Nothing happening here. Move along.

/sar

[Quix]

Guess I didn't consider it that poorly written. Scientific articles are not great prose as a rule. Even summaries for popularization of the facts tend to be overly obtuse. Not defending it. It's just very normal.

I think the basic facts were still quite discernable.

Congrats on your pregnancy, BTW. I wish you and child the best.

[Quix]

THANKS. LOL

GREAT BIT.

[tacticalogic]

I'm not a great fan of coerced legalized morality.

Wheather you're a "fan" or not, at the end of the day you're still going to demand that it be done.

However, without it, we'd likely be having orgies in the park and probably are in many areas already. It will get worse.

IOW if we can't regulate everything then we can't regulate anything. It's either handing over control of anything the government thinks need to be regulated or anarchy.

You haven't really addressed the problem of the means. You're going to want smoking banned in people's homes, at least in any homes where there are children present and preferably all of them. You won't be content to leave it up to the individual States and wait for them all get around to doing it or take the chance that some of them won't. You're going to want the federal government to do it, and they're going claim the authority to do so under the New Deal "anything that might affect commerce" clause. It's either that or get a constitutional amendment giving the federal government authority to do it, and you sure aren't going to be willing to wait for that. You may express some token regrets about having to do it that way, but you're still going to want it done.

[pageonetoo]

But I really don't feel that way. I think the defenseless children deserve some champions.

[tacticalogic]

Thanks. I was wondering if this was going to be covered under the "It's for the children" penumbra or the "It takes a village" emanation.

[Madame Dufarge]

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.

Your sloppily addended protestation that you "don't really feel that way" somehow doesn't ring true.

You see, your irrational, hysterical hatred of smokers is summed up very nicely by your "hastened deaths" remark.

It must be horrible to wake up in your head every day.

I must thank you for sharing your emotional breakdown with all us of us.

Very entertaining.

[Just another Joe]

There are studies in my list from all over the world.

How about one from Europe, and two from the USA? Three of the largest ever done.

I'll give you the details if you want.

[pageonetoo]

I began smoking cigarettes when I was 13 (1960). I smoked marlboro in the hard box. My mother and father smoked. Mom smoked Pall Mall (no filter) kings, and Pop loved a smelly cigar. They wouldn't have thought of going outside to smoke. They sat at the dining table, or in their favorite chairs. If guests came over, chances are that they smoked, as well. My dad was career Navy. The house looked like a bar, and smelled just fine. It was home.

I still smoked when my oldest was born, and my second son was exposed, as well. I smoked 2 1/2-3 packs a day, and quit in 1975, , when he was an infant.

Some of my grown children have smoked cigarettes. One smokes them noe. I just smoke smelly good cigars, these days, and my wife banished me to our enclosed front porch. I get to look through a window at the big screen, but my computer is right here, where I can watch, and smoke.

Pop is 83. Mom is 83. All of my siblings are alive and aging. All of my children, and theirs, as well.

I think it has come down to panty-waists, and braying asses, when it comes to modern day gum't! In the meantime, the country is full of illegals, and the enemy is knocking down the door (oops, that was the BATF, or was it the DEA?). I read about all the waste, and see some politician driving a new car to his beach house. How is it that so many of them come in with nothing, and go out with so much?

I guess they are good at games!

[tacticalogic]

What do you suppose the chances are that researchers working under beltway grants that produce results that indicate that we need more bureaucrats are more likely to get more grants to do more research?

[Alia]

Wait'll they get started going after major household-cleaner companies. "I Pledge to you, "Pledge" causes damage to the avioli. Do not let your children chew on the coffee table. While we are at it, you shouldn't have a coffee table. Coffee tables are usually made of wood. Rainforest depletion, and depletion of all trees is also a problem. Use a concrete slab instead. But why have a coffee table -- coffee can be inhaled thereby providing an airborne stimulant to your child which can make them psychotic and have lasting deleterious effects upon the child.

Oh, alas... Why have children. You don't really need to: The world is already over-populated.

What is needed are more Scolds! The Scolds are losing elections. And it's all everyone's fault. If only the voters had more avioli, the Scolds would Win! It's the lack of oxygen which is making you vote very, very baaaaaaaadly.......

///tape 43. End of public service announcement.

[Alia]

One of my kids suffered asthma, badly, every Spring. I did not put her on steroids. She used an inhaler when required. I home-built her an oxygen cave. Essentially, like a sauna, and for episodes.

Incrementally, and during the non-pollen seasons, I began expanding her lungs through walks, and eventually running. She began running with me, her sister, and eventually, others. She rollerbladed every day. She swam many miles. She runs 6 miles every other day (and marathons); and she has pretty much outgrown or overcome, pollen affliction. No asthma in 5 years. The regimen worked for her.

I am not suggesting it would work for everyone. Each case is different.

I have seen the "growth" in the asthma cases. One thing, I observed generally in most? Very little physical activity. Which is, in fact a tough call. Pretty hard to run when you have asthma. So, no, I'm not suggesting this applies across the board. Some people are born with weaker lungs. And some aren't.

[Quix]

You haven't really addressed the problem of the means. You're going to want smoking banned in people's homes, . . . You won't be content to leave it up to the individual States . . . . You're going to want the federal government to do it, . . . and you sure aren't going to be willing to wait for that.. . . but you're still going to want it done.

ACTUALLY,

NO, I won't.

It's not that raging a personal priority for me. I will likely continue to express outrage at the hypocrisy, selfishness, arrogance etc. of the smoker's position. I'll likely continue to grieve over the mangled lungs of the defenseless.

But the events of our era will very extremly out pace the priority of this issue. It will eventually be solved. And probably not in ways that you'd prefer or guess.

I can scarcely guess such details. I'm just convinced of the broad outline of that statement.

[ladyinred]

How did I ever make it? My dad smoked when I was a baby, a child, and an adult!

[Quix]

The only creature her unroyal lowness, her hideous heinous, Bw*tch Shrillery Antoinette de Fosterizer de Marx de Machiavelli de Stalin de Pol Pot . . . de Sade

champions

is the creature in her mirror.

And, probably, in due course, The Anti Christ.

[Just another Joe]

Or am I living in an alternate reality where "science" is all based on SELFISH BIASES, SELFISH ASSUMPTIONS, SELFISH RATIONALIZATIONS?

No, you're living in an alternate reality where much "science" is all based on, "SHOW ME THE MONEY!"

[tacticalogic]

Would you be in favor of or opposed to tobacco being classified and regulated as a scheduled drug under DEA/FDA guidelines?

[Quix]

I thought satire was greatly appreciated on these threads! LOL.

But certainly personal insult and attack are clearly cherished modes of posting on these threads.