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
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/97/23/12493
2'-Hydroxylation of nicotine by cytochrome P450 2A6 and human liver microsomes: Formation of a lung carcinogen precursor
Thats what would make smoking while pregnant dangerous to a fetus.
MY mother smoked with me, and I was born oxygen deficient, was blind, deaf, and couldnt walk until I was almost 4 years old..not to mention I have weird toes and an gynecomastia in my left breast...so therefore...
Responsible ones don't, but there are a number of irresponsible ones that do.
Unfortunately, they are also the ones that would take crack, drink alcohol, leave their babies in hot cars while they get their drugs, etc.
I don't know how to make parents more responsible, but I know you can't legislate it.
Nice change of subject.
Of course we all know that the world's knowledge base began when you were born, as is limited to what you know. < /sarc >
Controlling neurotics, next to ignarance, are Science's worst enemy.
STUDIES PROVE NOTHING.
Who processed the data and how?
What data was used?
How was it collected?
Was it Faulty?
Was it misinterpreted or is it being misrepresented?
Since we do not know the answers to these questions the study is worthless.
ping
Asthma is more likely caused by the milk subsidies given out by our US government.....
"Our results are potentially significant because aminoketone is the direct precursor to the tobacco-specific lung carcinogen NNK, which is believed to play a significant role as a cause of lung cancer in smokers"
They don't know if NNK is an ACTUAL cause of lung cancer.
Their 'experiments' are based on the assumption that it is.
Proves nothing.
PLEASE BRACE YOURSELF
for the DENIAL TROOPS to descend on you with all their fangs and claws.
Sounds like a very solid and important study, to me. Even the naysayers should have a hard time countering it. Not that they won't try--usually with lots of non-sequiters etc.
Great to see the science progressing increasingly toward protecting life.
Thanks for this important post.
Nanny State Ping..........
More agenda driven "studies."
How did anyone survive in the days of wood burning and coal stoves and fireplaces. Nowadays it is just the forest fires to worry about. /s
So, in other words, they did NOT make a connection to ETS. They made a connection to filtered air and/or aged and diluted sidestream cigarette smoke.
Since I can't get the actual study anywhere I won't comment on any of the normal things such as control groups, statistical analysis, etc.
Personally, I think the stats reflect an epidemic of diagnosis or self-diagnosis.
Smoke would not have any effect on the development of the lungs.
= = = =
WRONG. Perhaps reading the article again 3-4 more times might help.
FYI, smoke has 100's of carcinogens. SIMPLE FACT.
FYI, smoke born chemicals entering the mother get into her blood stream. SIMPLE FACT
FYI, said chemicals effect the very sensitive developing lung cells and the whole processes involved with said lung cells. SIMPLE FACT.
The assertion quoted from the ref'd post is SIMPLY WRONG.
HARD SCIENTIFIC FACTS HAVE REPEATEDLY PROVEN SUCH A NOTION ABUNDANTLY WRONG.
as in W R O N G, WRONG.
Most folks of sufficient training realize that statistical summaries are inferior at predicting individual outcomes. Nevertheless, the ODDS ARE VERY ACCURATE ESTIMATIONS of survival rates etc. etc. given proper parameters and criteria involved.
DENIAL BORN Glibness is a poor predictor of extended life, however.
Nobody knows what actually causes many cancers, possibly viruses, bacteria or chemical exposure, but we can certainly gather evidence to come to an idea, in fact if 50% of lung cancer patients were smokers, while only 20% of the population smokes, is that evidence to you? The truth is studies like this are important to help discover cures or to prevent cancer from even occuring. I realize many freepers are tepid against these things, calling the studies flawed, funded by anti-smoking nazis etc..but to say that smoking is safe or whatever is simple silliness, like I said I am a smoker, who comes from a smoker who died of lung cancer, I know the difference my body has shown from before I smoked to what it is now, there is a difference. Sure some people are genetically predisposed to cancer, but sometimes that predisposal needs a catalyst and smoking for some is that catalyst.
EXCELLENT LOGIC, COURTESY, REASONABLENESS AND WISDOM.
SOOOOOOOOOOOO REFRESHING.
Thanks.
And may you and your lungs be free from the trashy assault as soon as workable.
I was being sarcastic.
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