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
I think their attitude comes from a feeling of harrassment; most of them are tired of being picked on.
I wasn't aware that wholesale brazen distortion of fact was such a habit of some smokers.
I have been repeatedly accused hereon of advocating governmental intervention to stop smoking around children.
I have never once posted such on this thread. Actually, I've said It's not a priority for me to go down that path at all.
Evidently DENIAL reigns supreme even about what I have posted or not on this thread. Interesting.
I think governmental efforts to force morality are problematic. I welcome them at stop lights. But I'm troubled by them in a lot of other areas.
I much prefer consciousness raising and through provoking presentations, dialogues where possible--virtually never on these threads it seems--and public displays of evidence etc.
But, hey, I recognize that on these threads, I'll be falsely accused and my statements twisted worse than a pretzel. Par for the course.
Of course, all done in the greatest of charity and thoughtfulness for others by those who so glibly with great TYRANNICAL CONTROL WORSE THAN ANY GOVERNMENTAL LAWS AND ENFORCEMENT--FORCE THE UNBORN AND CHILDREN TO SUFFER THEIR SMOKE TO THE CHILDREN'S LUNG AND HEALTH DEGREDATION. But, I know, one mustn't let the facts hinder one's selfish and arrogant, self-destructive pleasures.
/sar
Studies can cover a wide spectrum for many reasons. I've seen enough solid quality studies implicating second hand smoke, the jury is in, for me.
I have no need to bother my friend as you suggest. He's shown me plenty before. I'd rather he spent his time doing what he does best for the air of Hawaii.
Thanks.
Oh, dear, all these fierce comments against me are not loving thoughtfulness in behalf of my betterment?
Oh, dear! My, my. What a surprise!
/sar
I fail to see the cognative dissonance.
BTW, context is usually a high priority in assessing all kinds of things.
I realize it's a highly unlikely fantasy to be realized but I still kind of have the delusion that what I write about on this thread is considered appropos to this thread etc. and will be considered as such.
Silly notion, I realize.
What facts have you popsted on this thread?
What evidence, scientific or anecdotal, have you given us other than your opinion?
I've even taken another posters studies and shown that many of them DO NOT support their stance.
Give us your facts so we can look at them with a dispassionate eye.
"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."
Been consulting the crystal ball again?
Give me their names, authors, etc.
Don't hedge, don't tell me to find them for myself, just give me their names so I can go look at them.
My mind is open enough to be changed.
I haven't seen even a large minority of studies that support your stance.
HELLO?
I have not once, on this thread, said it was a priority to me to have the govenment get involved in the issue.
I'd much prefer social pressure.
But, hey, I realize that like the FACTS about smoking and second hand smoke--
THE FACTS about what I say on this thread really don't matter.
It's customary to twist them into any fool thing to satisfy the selfishness, arrogance and TYRANNICAL NAZI-LIKE CONTROL NEEDS OF SMOKERS TO FORCE THE UNBORN AND CHILDREN to endure the health degredations the smoking of the tyrannical smokers causes their defenseless bodies and defenseless personhoods.
Evidently comparisons on satire about issues and motives in general vs directly personhood insulting and attacking of individuals is a difficult thing to discrimminate about. Perhaps that's related to the difficulty in discrimminating between good studies and bad so in rampant evidence hereon.
THE FACTS about what I say on this thread really don't matter.
Once again, what facts?
Not my quote on this thread about anything I've said or mentioned on this thread.
I guess context is of no consequence. Shouldn't be a surprise to me.
CONTEXT is very critical in all the studies on second hand smoke. This study starting this thread was very good on context. Yet, evidently the difficulty in assessing, understanding and wisely, fittingly using context in the discussion seems to have escaped the majority of the smoking population hereon.
HOGWASH.
I happen to have the bias
THAT ONE CHILD'S LIFE is worth all the selfish pleasures of the whole population of the country. Particularly from God's perspective and normally THE BOSS is the one to please.
I happen to have the bias that 7 or 12 or 1,200 or 12,000,000 lives are worth bettering health-wise and certainly worth saving.
I realize that the Marxist, liberal, Globalist tyrannical feel-good-do-it- Machiavellian crowd running the culture of death is happy to cheer smokers on as on their team.
But those aren't my values. Those aren't my biases.
DENIAL AND REATIONALIZATION
can sure be ugly defenses.
Self-justification is such a wonderful magic carpet.
/sar
What sweet, loveable, sensible, life protecting suggestions!
/sar
On this topic, I prefer to leave that to others to fight out.
It's conceivable I might vote my preference if it came to that. But I have no need to wade wholesale into that public battle.
I much prefer social pressure and thought provoking presentations and discussions.
I realize many hereon will blackwash me up one side and down the other anyway because I chose to call a spade a spade about their selfishness and arrogance. Interesting how good they are at blackwashing while hating what they perceive as that so much.
Probably.
But they live
IN DENIAL
about how insideously HARRASING AND DESTRUCTIVE THEIR SMOKE IS--often with others having NO CHOICE--NO PRACTICAL, FUNCTIONAL CHOICE ABOUT PUTTING UP WITH IT or not.
What hypocrisy. What rank bleeding hypocrisy!
Not my priority. Plenty of facts began this thread from a quality, well done study.
Plenty of other facts were referenced.
I have no need to get into the tedium of such details.
So . . . BTTTTTBBBTTTT to that.
Sounds like selective perception or arbitrary selection of studies, to me.
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