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
Naw.
I have other priorities.
Thanks anyway.
If it is a political solution, I have no doubt it will be at the expense of the Constitutional integrity of the Republic.
No, you're living in an alternate reality where much "science" is all based on, "SHOW ME THE MONEY!"
= = = =
But it's a VERY UNscientific giant leap of FAITH
to therefore ASSUME
that ALL smoking studies are useless.
Sheesh.
This is not that difficult, folks.
Well it would certainly qualify if it was to follow the normal criteria process!
But I'm not a great fan of the FDA.
I think corruption abounds.
Pushing the idea that people are too stupid and selfish to be trusted to decide for themselves is helping them assume the authority to make those decisions for us.
You think that's bad...36 years ago, I was going thru right at 5 packs a day. chain smoking.
On a better note, 26 years ago, down to 2 to 3 packs a day, I quit cold turkey.
I hope I'm wrong. I wouldn't be surprised if the Constitution were sadly compromised significantly before whatever happens to eradicate smoking.
The globalists have already shredded it royally and are eager to shred it totally and working hard to do so in behalf of the world government.
I ASSUME nothing.
Of all the studies I have read, all the abstracts I have read, and all the risk ratios I have seen associated with them, it runs about 80% that there is no statistical significance associated with ETS causing harm to someone that has no preexisting medical condition.
About 20% find a very slight risk or even some type of casual association.
From what I've been able to ascertain a number of that 20% have no control groups, are sloppy in documenting confounding factors, or are metastudies where the studies and/or data has been cherry picked.
I've done my homework on this subject. Have you?
idea that people are too stupid and selfish to be trusted to decide for themselves
= = = =
One doesn't need to push that idea at all. It's liberally demonstrated in millions of homes.
The unmitigated HEAVY HANDED CONTROL of the oxygen flow to the lungs of unborn and other children is rampant all over the place. It's not per se merely an idea. It's a vigorously implemented tyrannical and successful conquest over the defenseless acted out tens of millions of times daily.
Such people are NOT deciding merely "for themselves." They are deciding arbitrarily, tyrannically, Nazi-like for the defenseless. And such decisions are defended vigorously with denial, selfishness, laziness, arrogance, self-righteousness, great hostility etc. all the while pretending great freedom loving ethics--EXCEPT, OF COURSE, for the defenseless unborn and other children and their lungs.
But smokers and tobacco?
I just don't get it. It is pure hysteria.
Thank you.
I have a good friend in Hawaii who's head of a group that examines such studies. I trust his homework. He asserts that the smokers' position is off the wall in denial and avoidance of facing up to the myriad of solid, well constructed double-bind studies etc.
But, hey, I don't need to get that deep into it. The hogwash is abundantly evident on these threads in the lack of logic; the selfishness; the arrogance; the rationalizations; etc. based on aereogel or less.
How many of us PhD's in clinical psychology are there on here with qualifications to assess hysteria?
I don't hate smokers.
I hate their denial, selfishness, irrationality about such studies; their HEAVY HANDED CONTROL over the defenseless lives of the unborn and other children to those individuals' compromised lungs and general health . . . I hate their hypocrisy.
Lives of the innocent have always been worth my concern as well as my emotions and my speaking out.
Woe to the day when America has too few willing to speak out for the defenseless.
You claim you don't push the idea and then proceed to devote a couple of paragraphs to exactly that. You don't want more government control, nooooo. You'll just help instigate it and then deny any resposibility for the consequences.
Then ask your friend what the RR is that epidemiologists require to form a casual relationship between factors and results.
Then ask him what percentage of studies on ETS match that RR.
Most epedemiologists require a 2.00 and would prefer a 3.00 before associating any factors with a result.
I'm not trying to demean your friend but there is a lot of difference betwen studies on first hand smoke and ETS.
And I didn't think you would want to see what three of the largest studies done to date actually say, but I thought I'd see how open your mind was.
It already has been to some degree. Always in small increments, always "for our own good".
Re: your third paragraph
Well said! Only thing I'd change is add the word "hateful" to selfish and irrational.
Fomenting smokism.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
Boy, ain't this thread rich.
Well intentioned single-mindedness with absolutely no regard for unintended consequences.
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