According to a new study, children who are regularly exposed to tobacco smoke at home were more likely to develop early emphysema in adulthood. This finding by researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health suggests that the lungs may not recover completely from the effects of early-life exposures to tobacco smoke (ETS). The study was published in the December 2009 American Journal of Epidemiology.
Children who are exposed to tobacco smoke during their early development can develop abnormal behavioral symptoms by the age of 10. This association was discovered using data from the GINI-plus study by scientists of Helmholtz Zentrum München in collaboration with colleagues of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Technische Universität München, and Marienhospital Wesel. The scientists observed that the impact of tobacco smoke was especially detrimental during gestation. The results of the study have been published in the current online issue of the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.
New evidence shows that parents play a key role in whether their adolescent children who experiment with tobacco become daily smokers before they graduate from high school.
Despite recent declines in cigarette smoking in the US, nicotine dependence has remained steady among adults and has actually increased in some groups. This finding suggests that public health initiatives have been more successful in preventing Americans from smoking than in persuading heavy smokers to stop.
Previous studies have found that since the 1964 US Surgeon General’s report, the number of people who smoke cigarettes has declined. Researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health take this research a step further by distinguishing occasional smokers from heavy smokers.
There may be a direct link between smoking cigarettes and brain damage, according to a new study from the Indian National Brain Research Center. Science Daily reports that researchers Debapriya Ghosh and Dr. Anirban Basu have found that a compound in tobacco provokes white blood cells in the central nervous system to attack healthy cells, leading to severe neurological damage.
