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
The study starting this thread is one.
There are sufficient quality ones in the long list of many provided.
There's more than sufficient evidence to have a fair comparison of well derrived researched facts.
I have no need to get into that level of tedium, thanks anyway.
What comes around goes around. If you don't like the tone of the replies you get you might start with looking at what it is that's being replied to.
Therefore, I can only assume that you have nothing of worth to give to the discussion with any type of facts and will take your posts accordingly.
Then, once again, show me the preponderance of studies that say otherwise.
My mind is open.
So it's tedium saving the lungs of unborn, newborn, and young folk that you keep referring to yourself as caring so much about?
If you can't give the studies, you ain't even read the abstracts or synopsis and don't know what you're talking about.
I can go through the entire 708 studies the other poster talked about and on ETS it will come out about 80% against there being harm and 20% for.
You can't even look up any that support your stance because it's tedious.
Bah
This study may prove seminal in a series of future studies focusing on the many harmful agents and practices that might inhibit the proper growth of developing children; each, in turn, targeted to a particular agent or practice and each likewise calling for modifications in practice and questioning the use of heretofore "harmless" foods, additives, products etc.
The list could well be endless.
Every crusade must have a goal and enemies to conquer.
Yes and no.
I've observed over the years that it doesn't tend to matter much what tone one uses on these smoking threads.
Just disagreeing with the HEAVY HANDED CONTROL of the air of children and the chemicals impacting the unborn's lungs is quite enough to get a relentless barrage of harsh comments.
It's not a big deal to me. Just the hypocrisy about it is sad.
ASSUME AWAY.
It's the chronic habit of smokers, in my observations, anyway.
Certainly on these threads.
LOL.
Thanks.
Agreed.
You seem quite upset over something that's not a big deal to you.
When asked again, and again, ........and again, to provide facts, studies, any type of proof to make me reasses my stance and receive nothing but, "I don't care to get into that much tedium", what am I supposed to do?
Take everything you say as God's TRUTH and say, "YAYYYYYYY for Quix. Quix shot down another one with their inaccessable knowledge"
Sorry my mind isn't quite THAT open.
I'm from Missouri. Show me.
Just because some aspects are not a big deal doesn't mean other aspects aren't.
Last I checked, this issue has many facets and factors involved.
Must be that challenge that discrimmination between various variables presents. Interesting.
I prefer to allow folks with such a rabid fierceness regarding the freedom to throw trash in children's lungs and hazard for life-long the breathing capacities of the unborn's lungs . . . the freedom to do their own research analyses.
LOL.
Heading off to the college now.
People find the answers they seek. Absolute knowledge does not get funded.
Grants seldom go to those who go forth with wide open eyes seeking the complete answer to a problem or question. Instead the trend is to sieze on some popular 'boogeyman' and flog it to death, spending kings' ransoms to do so.
Only afterward is it discovered that the problem still exists, fodder for the next 'anti-boogeyman' jihad.
Maybe if tobacco had a better smell, like fresh mown hay (or Phosgene gas) it would be more popular.
Few would argue it is good for anyone's lungs to smoke, but the selfsame medical industry which decries the dilutions in homeopathy as quackery is off on a tear decrying the diluted contents of cigarette smoke as uber-terrible carcinogens. Why is that logical flaw not seen? Because people see what they want to.
All the while those who cannot be fundamentally honest enough to say they just think the smoke stinks welcome each new tidbit of 'data' (no matter how questionable), with the glee of a Homecoming crowd seeing their team get a touchdown, and use that data to embrace the sort of regulation (establishing precedent) which they would never welcome under circumstances which might impinge on their lives or livelihoods.
That will have deeper ramifications for all of us, just as the continuing expenditure of research money to villify tobacco will (instead of using the funding for basic research into the mechanisms of cancer--all cancer).
The next obvious sin will be obesity, even the best girdle won't hide it, it will be regulated by the BMI which will not 'read' right for those who have musculature better developed than the statistical average, and will be decried as vehemently as smoking. Anyone who was ever the 'fat kid' in their class can tell you that.
Whatever. About the time we are all just perfect we will likely be overrun by some bunch of khat chewing zealots who don't raise their children in a bubble, while whining about the smell.
You may not agree with me, but I believe you should let your babies cry (a little--it develops the lungs), and when they get older, let them play in the dirt, it develops their immune system. Soothe them, feed them wholesome food, wash them, and put them in a clean bed at night. It worked for us.
For now, I can only wish you luck in pursuing your strident, harsh and uncompromising campaign in a thoughtful, reasonable and objective manner.
You have a good day and don't let anyone know any facts so you can change their minds on anything.
God, I love Babelfish.
"Oh, dear, all these fierce comments against me are not loving thoughtfulness in behalf of my betterment?"
Now, that IS funny.
"I fail to see the cognative dissonance. "
I figured as much.
"God, I love Babelfish."
How do you get rid of the SMELL those leave behind?
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