Parents' Smoking Can Kill Children Years Later

Parents' Smoking Can Kill Children Years Later
Secondhand smoke in home linked to adult lung cancer

FRIDAY, Jan. 28 (HealthDayNews) -- Here's one more study that shows
smoking is bad not only for the health of people who light up but also
for those around them -- specifically, for children who breathe in
their parents' secondhand smoke.

This research comes from Europe, and it finds that children exposed to
secondhand smoke on a daily basis have more than triple the risk of
lung cancer and an increased risk of other respiratory problems later
in life than those who grew up in a smoke-free environment.

The report appears in the Jan. 28 online issue of the British Medical
Journal.

While a number of previous studies have shown the same sort of risk,
this one is different because "it is one of the few prospective studies
in which information about exposure has been collected before
information about the outcome," said study author Dr. Paolo Vineis, a
professor of environmental epidemiology at Imperial College London.

It also included a large number of people, more than 123,000 in 10
European countries, who provided information on exposure to secondhand
smoke and were followed for an average of seven years.

During that time, 97 people in the study had newly diagnosed lung
cancer, 20 had cancers of the upper respiratory tract and 14 died of
chronic obstructive lung disease or emphysema.

The increased lung cancer risk was the most striking -- 3.6 times
greater for those whose parents smoked. That might seem a large number
but, Vineis said, "most of these people are nonsmokers, and you have to
put together a lot of people to detect a relatively small number of
lung cancers."

Overall, the risk of all lung diseases was 30 percent higher for those
exposed to secondhand smoke in childhood, the study found. Predictably,
the risk was "consistently higher in former smokers than in those who
never smoked," the report said.

The finding adds to the damage that secondhand smoke is known to
inflict on children. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates
that secondhand smoke is responsible for 15,000 to 300,000 lower
respiratory tract infections in children each year, causing 7,500 to
15,000 hospitalizations. The EPA also blames secondhand smoke for as
many as 1 million asthma attacks in children annually.

And secondhand smoke can be more immediately fatal to children. It is
blamed for an estimated 1,900 to 2,700 cases of sudden infant death
syndrome in the United States each year.

"Most countries are introducing laws about secondhand smoke exposure,"
Vineis said. Most recently, Italy has banned smoking in all public
places, including bars and restaurants. New York and other cities in
the United States have similar bans.

Smoking at home cannot be banned. But "parents should avoid smoking at
all times in the presence of their children," Vineis advised.

Dr. Norman Edelman, a consultant on scientific affairs for the American
Lung Association, goes further. "If you must smoke, don't smoke in an
indoor area that is shared by anyone else," he said.

One important finding of the new study is that the harmful effect of
secondhand smoke is much greater in former smokers than nonsmokers,
Edelman said.

"It gives credence to the idea that total exposure to smoke is a major
determinant of damage," he said. "Basically, cigarette smoke is bad no
matter how you take it in."
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