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

[383rr]

"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."

This would be funny, if it didn't scare the hell out of me.

I belive you were on a thread titled Americans will die for freedom, correct?

I thought you made an excellent post , here:

"It may be corroded form the inside. Certainly terrorism of itself won't defeat us. Liberal/luvvey whining is more pernicious.
= = = = = = =

If the liberal idiots were only whining, we could likely survive logner.

But they are funding; lobbying; propagandizing; teaching in UNIV's and K-12; MSM media; passing laws; controlling technologies; exerting Machiavellian manipulations through the MSM; through traitors especially in the Senate; etc. etc. etc. all toward the tyrannical global government. And many have been involved for more than 30-50 years. Some say longer.

Scuba Teddy is a rank traitor.
Klintoons are rank evil traitors--Shrillery's the worst.
Boxerface is a rank traitor.
Puhlousey is a rank traitor.
Reid is a rank traitor.
The list goes on.

They are intent on trashing our sovereignity and turning the ruling of America over to a global dictator.

They are intent on reducing the world's population by force drastically.

Most of them are concsiously complicit in these goals. Some are ignorant of the ultimate goals though the evidence is all over the place--but they energetically support people and goals resulting in same.

Satanic driven treason is harder to survive than mere whining.

Together, they are plenty intolerable."



55 posted on 08/11/2006 2:44:24 AM PDT by Quix (LET GOD ARISE AND HIS ENEMIES BE SCATTERED. LET ISRAEL CALL ON GOD AS THEIRS! & ISLAM FLUSH ITSELF)
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Too bad what you say here don't back that up.

[Mears]

"smokers don't light up around babies as a rule...non-issue"

---

Aaaah but they used to. I did,mu husband did,most of our friends did and there was no harm done at all. Very healthy kids.

They may not smoke anymore around babies in the USA but have you been to Eastern Europe lately? They still puff away in front of the little ones and the kids will all be just fine.

Check the asthma statistics-----kids are sicker now !

[383rr]

"Check the asthma statistics-----kids are sicker now !"


Oh, I'm sure there's a "study" somewhere that will prove it's all the fault of SHS.

That stuff can travel to the moon, and it NEVER dissipates.

[383rr]

"PLEASE BRACE YOURSELF

for the DENIAL TROOPS to descend on you with all their fangs and claws."


HAHA. I just had to resond to this one, too.

It's not about smoking for me. It's about the freedom to make a personal decision.

When they come for the obese, I will fight them, and I am not obese. I fought the gun-grabbers. I will fight the food-police. I will fight ALL the nanny-statists, regardless of the subject. What you wish to happen will have no end. It will consume everything, and only a fool (or hardcore nannystatist) would believe otherwise.

Governmental intrusion into our homes and daily lives is NOT what this country was built on.

[elkfersupper]

That stuff can travel to the moon, and it NEVER dissipates.

You have swerved into another area of anti-smoker propaganda that is truly the theatre of the absurd.

Check this out.

It Must Be the Plutonium: Anti-Smoking Group Provides Explanation for How 30 Minutes of Secondhand Smoke Exposure Could Be So Deadly

[383rr]

Good grief.

You gotta be kidding me.

[elkfersupper]

You gotta be kidding me.

Nope.

Kooks.

[383rr]

I didn't know kryptonite was in smoke. My god .

BAN IT NOW.





(

[Madame Dufarge]

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

Mote-in-eye alert!

[Alia]

:) Thanks for saying so.

[CSM]

"Really? The rest of us though that the reason you keep puffing is because you fail to take personal responsibility for your actions. Some conservative you are!"

You really are logic deficient. I chose to smoke, and one major factor in that choice is that it cheeses off the nannystaters. How is that failing to take personal responsibility for my actions? How is your attempts to meddle in my life taking personal responsibility for your actions?

[CSM]

"Not my quote.

Therefore, the justification, reason for the personal insult and attack on me is unclear."

You aren't aware of the contents of your own profile?

[CSM]

"Smoke is not food. If you eat a carcinogenic food next to me I am not harmed. You smoke next to me I breathe in the smoke and stink."

Then don't allow smoking on property that you own and stay off property that is owned by someone that allows smoking. In other words, don't take your baby to bars!

[CSM]

First in your post #195 you say this:

I happen to have the bias . . . some might consider it blind faith . . . that not all individuals likely to read the study are as thoroughly in denial, self-justification, rationalization addiction; chronic selfishness; chronic rebellion etc. as some are in some communities.

Therefore, when they read such a study, they will likely earnestly adjust their behaviors toward enhancing and protecting the lives of their unborn and young children much more than they otherwise would have.

I think that's a pretty good outcome for the study's costs and bother. Much better than the outcome for many tax dollars spent.

---

Then in post #219 you say this:

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.

---

Interesting that you don't actually think that this study protects life after all. Instead you agree that your rhetoric is actually useless.

[NCLaw441]

You said, in part: It's not about smoking for me. It's about the freedom to make a personal decision.
***

I support the right to smoke, although I really dislike the habit, and am convinced that smoking was the cause of my mother's death at 43 from lung cancer. However, it was her choice, a personal decision. Laws should not infringe on the decision to smoke.

Unfortunately, I did not get to make a personal decision about exposure to cigarette smoke as an infant until I moved away from home. My parents smoked heavily, and I had no choice about breathing it in, and having the stench in my clothes, hair, etc. In the car it was awful, as I and my younger sister and brother could not escape the smoke, with windows up and the smoke billowing.

Today, my sister smokes, my brother and I never have. My sister displays the same inconsiderate behavior as my mother and father did, but her youngest is in his senior year of high school. Where was THEIR personal decision about exposure to cigarette smoke?

Fortunately for infants of smokers, they don't know that air is not naturally smoky, and are not in distress (with some health exceptions).

All of that said, I don't support laws on the subject, only honesty in the debate about exposing those who have no choice in the matter. Homeowners and businesses should decide if smoking is allowed on their property, free from government intrusion. Children, though, should not be forced to breathe in cigarette smoke, whether it proves to be deadly or not, simply as a matter of courtesy-- the same courtesy most, but not all, smokers show to adults before they light up.

[Edit35]

Stretch, stretch, stretch.

So....you hate smoking around children?

Fine. Join zillions of people in that rational opinion. (including me)

But what's your mission, other than to jawbone about the awfulness of second hand smoke?

Jailtime for offenders? Perhaps a hefty fine, and sensitivity training?

Perhaps we sterilize anyone who smokes so they could never light up near a little one.

In that case, we must also go after those who fail to 'child-proof' their home, or those who have dangerous back yards, or those who bring along children in their vehicles.

After all, statistics likely will prove that more children are killed or maimed during vehicle accidents than by second hand smoke.

In fact, I can't recall ever seeing on a child's death certificate "Cause of Death: Second Hand Smoke", and as a newspaper reporter, I've seen many a death certificate.

[Smokin' Joe]

Maybe it just documents the rise in catalytic converter equipped cars. Whatever comes out of those has made me nauseous at a single stoplight (while riding motorcycles). /kidding--or not.

Then, too, it might coincide with the use of carseats for chilren.

Maybe undetected byproducts emanated by CDs when the laser hits them.

Cell phone radiation

Soccer games

plastic in auto interiors

wall to wall carpeting

'manufactured' building material fumes

Gaia commanding the ragweed to make nastier pollen

Whatever the reason, it seems to me smoking has become the universal whipping boy for all the evils of our environment.

If it is so d@mned bad, just ban it and maybe we can quit seeing billions pi$$ed away annually on nonsense and the 'researchers' can get around to finding out what is making people sick.

One thing I have noticed, though. The drug companies must have passed out a few tons of samples last trip through town, 'cause virtually every doctor has been pushing that kids have "allergies". So I have to ask, has "Asthma" been redifined, like they did to AIDS to inflate the numbers??

[pageonetoo]

How many of us PhD's in clinical psychology are there on here with qualifications to assess hysteria?

I stayed at a Holiday Inn last night. Does that qualify?

I have no degree in psycholgy, and only took 23 hours worth in college. I am a businessman, and a father of five children. I have made most of money talking people out of theirs. I am in sales. I talk very good, and have developed a pretty fair understgainding of human behavior. It doesn't take a PHD in anything to seed bullshit!

You could hate your mother, and love to lick toes, but if you don't smoke, you are agood person, and your children will be safe from any harm!

Psychology is akin to chiropractors and witchdoctors. Just a little ajustment for some, a little pill for others...

Do you have a field of specialty, or is it just general contempt for everyone else. How many boys do wish to see medicated, so they won't act like boys? You only get one answer, so think about it. We all have a life to live friend, and ours is none of your damn business. You can study all you wish, and take your wallpaper and put it where it will do some good.

Keep your OWN house smoke free, and don't go to bars, or restaurants which allow it. If some businessman likes a cigar in his office, you can chose not to do business with him. That should be the choice of any decent American. However, some in the community stand to profit from this crap and that is the problems referenced in the article... or do PHD's not know how to read?

(You can get your Witch doctor accessory kit by clicking below! do your own search...)

[Old Professer]

Another interesting thing about this graph is that the numbers peaked in 1995; a Google search turned up 1,760,000 articles in 1994 on asthma, while 1995 had only 85,200 and 1996 jumped up to 3,310,000.

By contrast, a search on articles on breast cancer for 1995 turned up 9,670,000 articles while the cancer rate held stable.

[Old Professer]

We are discussing the role of the state; how much intervention is necessary and justified?