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
True, and most of them are ubiquitous; eliminate nicotine entirely or leave it alone are the best choices.
If only that were true. A simple example is cervical cancer. More than 95% of cervical cancer is caused by a sexually transmitted virus, HPV. Yet, the agenda-driven still claim smoking is the number 1 cause of cervical cancer. Instead of seaking a cure, or education on prevention, they continue to blame smoking for something they have already proven is NOT caused by smoking.
I don't claim smoking is a harmless habit, let alone a healthy one, but it is sure as heck not the cause of nearly every ailment known to mankind as claimed by the anti-smoker paid professionals.
OMG, when did Global Warming start? Wasn't it just about the same time that they started the Stop Smoking push? I wonder if anyone has done a study to find out if everyone quitting smoking so quickly over the past couple of years is what has caused global warming?
I notice that, as usual, the report is long on conclusions and totally devoid of fact. No methodology. No mention of a control group.
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Then check out the original SCIENTIFICALLY PUBLISHED ARTICLES IN THE SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS
instead of a popularized summary.
Sheesh.
All of us who grew up in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, more often surrounded by the smoke of our parents and others, were healthier than most kids are today. I mean, hasn't the incidence of childhood asthma been going up as the number of smokers has gone down?
And even though the study was ALREADY paid for they want you to BUY the study.
I won't personally send money to people that do advocacy science.
Maybe you need to start posting to the 'anger management' thread since you seem to have a problem with SHOUTING!
When my kids used to shout, I just ignored them. Which I will do with you.
Come back when you can have a 'civil' discussion.
bye now!
I tried saying earlier to him that nicotine,as well as other chemicals are converted into carcinogens in the liver, our normal blood filter place, and is put back into the bloodstream thus it is able to be readily transferred to the fetus.
Quick! We must write up a fat grant proposal. We don't have a minute to lose! :)
CHEMICALS. CHEMICALS. CHEMICALS. CHEMICALS. CHEMICALS.
1. Mammal bodies have a myriad of a diversity of types of cells.
2. Specific cells and specific cell types have specific sensitivities and extra sensitivities to specific chemicals and specific chemical compounds--INCLUDING THE 100'S OF CARCINOGENS IN SMOKE--1ST HAND AND 2ND HAND.
THOSE ARE JUST BASIC--ACTUALLY--VERY, VERY, VERY BASIC FACTS.
3. Specific chemical sensitivities of lung cells are rather well documented. DENIAL DOES NOT CHANGE THE FACTS.
4. Delivery of the offending chemicals and chemical compounds to the cell sites can happen via blood AT LEAST.
Sigh.
I don't know about you, but dealing with anti-smokers does cause me to break out in hives.
"Why would 'ticklish' airways develop in an unborn rat?"
Better yet, how would they track or find that condition in an unborn rat?
It shouldn't cost you anything to ask valid questions. Tell them you are a member of the media representing FreeRepublic.com.
There you go again.
EXPECTING HARD, SOLID FACTS to blunt the DENIAL SO CHRONICALLY FLOODING smoking threads.
DENIAL and selfishness and rebellion.
All pretending to be intellectually defensible, freedom-loving; modern; with-it; kosher; warranted; advisable; wonderful; life-enhancing.
Sheesh.
and made it to the ripe old age of 86.
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We do not understand how/why some individuals seem to have an immunity to smoke born carcinogens etc. But they do.
HOWEVER, SUCH INDIVIDUALS HAVE NO VALIDITY IN PREDICTING DEATH RATES AND SHORTENED LIVES OF THOSE WITHOUT SUCH GENETIC IMMUNITY.
This is not rocket science, folks.
Denial is not a route to enlightenment.
"Great to see the science progressing increasingly toward protecting life."
Specifically, how does this study protect life?
"My dad did three and a half packs of Camels a day and my mom finished off two packs of Pall Malls. We lived in a three room apartment. I must already have died and just don't know it."
THERE WE HAVE IT!!!! Solid indisputable evidence that all these scientists know nothing at all. Go ahead, stand over your babies and smoke. You could even give em a shotgun!!
Ummm how can it not be true and then you go on to state numbers, that maybe came from a study? Perhaps that study was important in helping to find a vaccine for certain HPV's? You countered your own argument with what you were arguing about there.
STUDIES PROVE NOTHING.
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Oh, really?
So, that's why we are so OBVIOUSLY devoid of all the benefits of said PROVE-NOTHING-STUDIES and all still running around in very soiled breach-cloths hunting, gathering and grunting barely intelligbly.
Perfectly clear.
DENIAL IS NOT A GOOD SURVIVAL HABIT.
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