Smoke

Smoking Before Fatherhood May Raise Asthma Risk in Kids: Study

Men who smoke before becoming a parent may put their children at increased risk for asthma, a new study suggests.

Smoking Before Fatherhood May Raise Asthma Risk in Kids

Researchers analyzed the smoking habits of more than 13,000 men and women, and then looked at the incidence of asthma in their children. The results showed that asthma was much more common in children whose fathers were smokers before conception. A child’s risk of asthma increased if the father smoked before age 15, and the risk grew the longer the father smoked.

While the finding showed an association between a man’s smoking history and asthma risk in his children, it did not prove cause-and-effect.

There was no association between a mother being a smoker prior to conception and a child’s risk of asthma, according to the study that was to be presented Monday at the European Respiratory Society meeting in Munich, Germany.

“This study is important as it is the first study looking at how a father’s smoking habit pre-conception can affect the respiratory health of his children,” Dr. Cecile Svanes, of the University of Bergen in Norway, said in a European Lung Foundation news release.

“Given these results, we can presume that exposure to any type of air pollution, from occupational exposures to chemical exposures, could also have an effect. It is important for policymakers to focus on interventions targeting young men and warning them of the dangers of smoking and other exposures to their unborn children in the future,” Svanes added.

Animal studies have suggested that a father’s exposures before becoming a parent can harm his offspring, the researchers noted.

Research presented at meetings should be viewed as preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Source: health day

E-Cigarettes Won’t Help You Quit, Study Finds

r-ELECTRONIC-CIGARETTE-large570

Contrary to some advertising claims, electronic cigarettes don’t help people quit or cut down on smoking, a new study says.

Users of e-cigarettes inhale vaporized nicotine but not tobacco smoke. The unregulated devices have been marketed as smoking-cessation tools, but studies to date have been inconclusive on that score, the study noted.

“When used by a broad sample of smokers under ‘real world’ conditions, e-cigarette use did not significantly increase the chances of successfully quitting cigarette smoking,” said lead researcher Dr. Pamela Ling, an associate professor at the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at University of California, San Francisco.

These findings — based on nearly 1,000 smokers — are consistent with other studies and contradict the claims frequently found in e-cigarette advertising, she said.

“Advertising suggesting that e-cigarettes are effective for smoking cessation should be prohibited until such claims are supported by scientific evidence,” Ling said.

For the study, Ling’s team analyzed data reported by 949 smokers, 88 of whom used e-cigarettes at the start of the study. One year later, 14 percent of the smokers had quit overall, with similar rates in both groups.

“We found that there was no difference in the rate of quitting between smokers who used an e-cigarette and those who did not,” Ling said. There was no relationship between e-cigarette use and quitting, even after taking into account the number of cigarettes smoked per day, how early in the day a smoker had a first cigarette and intention to quit smoking, Ling added.

However, the researchers noted that the small number of e-cigarette users may have limited the ability to find an association between e-cigarette use and quitting.

The report, published online March 24 in JAMA Internal Medicine, also found that women, younger adults and people with less education were most likely to use e-cigarettes.

One expert said the study is flawed and shouldn’t be taken seriously. “It’s an example of bogus or junk science,” said Dr. Michael Siegel, a professor of community health sciences at Boston University School of Public Health.

“That’s because the study does not examine the rate of successful smoking cessation among e-cigarette users who want to quit smoking or cut down substantially on the amount that they smoke, and who are using e-cigarettes in an attempt to accomplish this,” Siegel said. “Instead, the study examines the percentage of quitting among all smokers who have ever tried e-cigarettes for any reason.”

Many of the smokers who tried e-cigarettes may have done so out of curiosity, Siegel said. “It is plausible, in fact, probable, that many of these 88 smokers were not actually interested in quitting or trying to quit with electronic cigarettes,” he said. “These products have become very popular and have gained widespread media attention, and it is entirely possible that many of these smokers simply wanted to see what the big fuss is all about.”

Calling that a “fatal flaw” in the research, Siegel said it “destroys the validity of the authors’ conclusion.” It would be a tragedy, he said, if policy makers use the study to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of e-cigarettes for smoking cessation purposes.

Erika Ford, assistant vice president for national advocacy at the American Lung Association, said the study confirms what is already clear — “e-cigarettes are not associated with quitting among smokers.”

Ford noted that most e-cigarette companies no longer make claims that their products help smokers quit. “But there is a need for the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] to begin their oversight of these products. It’s time for the FDA to find out which products are making no smoking claims and which ones might be in violation of current law,” she said.

The FDA plans to introduce regulations for e-cigarettes, but hasn’t yet. In the past, the agency has warned companies about making false claims and for poor manufacturing practices.

Source: webmd

Helping Smokers Quit, or Not Start in the First Place

“Even 50 years after the first surgeon general’s report on smoking and health, we’re still finding out new ways that tobacco kills and maims people,” Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, recently told me. “It’s astonishing how bad it is.”

Dr. Frieden and public health specialists everywhere are seeking better ways to help the 44 million Americans who still smoke to quit and to keep young people from getting hooked on cigarettes. “Fewer than 2 percent of doctors smoke. Why can’t we get to that rate in society as a whole?” he wondered.

One reason: Smoking rates are highest among the poor, poorly educated and people with mental illness, populations hard to reach with educational messages and quit-smoking aids.

But when I mentioned to Dr. Frieden, a former New York City health commissioner, that the city’s streets are filled with young adult smokers who appear to be well educated and well dressed, he said television seems to have had an outsize influence.

Focus groups of white girls in New York private schools have suggested a “Sex in the City” effect, he said: Girls think smoking makes them look sexy. In the last two years, middle-aged men, too, have begun smoking in increasing numbers after a half-century decline. Dr. Frieden cited “Mad Men,” the popular TV series featuring admen in the early 1960s, when well over half of American men smoked.

Dr. Frieden said that an antismoking effort begun in 2008 by the World Health Organization “can make a huge difference in curbing smoking, and we should fully implement what we know works.” The program is called Mpower:

M stands for monitoring tobacco use and the effectiveness of prevention programs like antismoking videos on YouTube.

P for protecting people from secondhand smoke. Half the country still lacks laws mandating smoke-free public places. The latest national health survey found that about half of children from nonsmoking households have metabolites of tobacco in their blood, Dr. Frieden said.

O for offering help to the 70 percent of smokers who say they would like to quit. “Tobacco use remains egregiously undertreated in health care settings,” Dr. Helene M. Cole, associate editor of JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and Dr. Michael C. Fiore, a professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin, wrote this month in the journal.

Medical aids for quitting smoking, which can triple the likelihood of success, should become available, without a co-pay, to many more people under the Affordable Care Act, Dr. Frieden said.

W for warning about smoking hazards through larger and more graphic messages on cigarette packs and paid advertising on radio and television.

E for enforcing bans on tobacco marketing, advertising, promotion and sponsorships. In bodegas throughout the country, Dr. Frieden said, “tobacco ads are used as wallpaper.” Smoking is freely depicted in movies and popular TV shows.

R for raising taxes, which studies have shown is the single most effective way to reduce smoking in the population, especially among teens.

“A higher cigarette tax is not a regressive tax, because it would help poor people even more than the well-to-do,” Dr. Frieden noted. President Obama has proposed an additional 94-cent-per-pack tax on cigarettes, which would yield $80 billion to fund universal prekindergarten.

Smokers ready to quit can choose from among a cornucopia of aids as wide-ranging as nicotine substitutes, low-dose antidepressants, hypnosis and acupuncture. While none by itself has a high rate of success, different methods have proved effective for different people. Many former smokers required several attempts before they managed to quit for good.

But quitting smoking does not necessarily require assistance. As two public health specialists, Andrea L. Smith and Simon Chapman at the University of Sydney in Australia, have pointed out, “The vast majority of quitters do so unaided.” A Gallup Poll conducted last year in the United States found that “only 8 percent of ex-smokers attributed their success to [nicotine replacement therapy] patches, gum or prescribed drugs,” these experts noted. “In contrast, 48 percent attributed their success to quitting ‘cold turkey’ and 8 percent to willpower, commitment or ‘mind over matter’.”

They added, “For many smokers, having a reason to quit (a why) was more important than having a method to quit (a how).”

For my husband, who smoked a pack a day for 50 years, the “why” was his distress at seeing two beautiful young nieces smoking; he made a pact with them to quit if they would, and he followed through.

Techniques that can help people trying to quit when troubled by the urge to smoke include waiting 10 minutes and distracting yourself; avoiding situations you associate with smoking, at least until you have become a committed ex-smoker; using stress reducers like physical activity, yoga, deep breathing, muscle relaxation and self-hypnosis; seeking moral support from a nonsmoking friend, family member or online stop-smoking program; and oral distractions like chewing sugarless gum or raw vegetables.

Electronic cigarettes are being promoted by some as a way to resist the real thing. E-cigarettes, invented in 2003 by a Chinese pharmacist, contain liquid nicotine that is heated to produce a vapor, not smoke. More than 200 brands are now on the market; they combine nicotine with flavorings like chocolate and tobacco.

But their contents are not regulated, and their long-term safety has not been established. In one study, 30 percent were found to produce known carcinogens. Dr. Frieden said that while e-cigarettes “have the potential to help some people quit,” the method would backfire “if it gets kids to start smoking, gets smokers who would have quit to continue to smoke, gets ex-smokers to go back to smoking, or re-glamorizes smoking.”

Nearly two million children in American middle and high schools have already used e-cigarettes, Dr. Frieden said. In an editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal last year, Dr. Matthew B. Stanbrook, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, suggested that fruit-flavored e-cigarettes and endorsements by movie stars could lure teens who would not otherwise smoke into acquiring a nicotine habit.

A survey in 2011 of 75,643 South Korean youths in grades 7 through 12 by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, revealed that four of five e-cigarette users also smoked tobacco. It could happen here: Stanton A. Glantz, the study’s senior author and a professor of medicine at the university, described e-cigarettes as “a new route to nicotine addiction for kids.”

Source: New York Times

Alcohol does not cause depression: Study

Researchers also debunk the view that mild to moderate alcohol consumption may reduce the risk of depression.

Contrary to popular belief, alcohol does not cause depression, Australian scientists have found.

Until now it was believed that alcohol caused people to become depressed, particularly if consumed at excessive levels, according to Professor Osvaldo Almeida, from The University of Western Australia.

“Even one of the diagnoses we have for depressive disorders – Substance Induced Mood Disorder – is a diagnosis where alcohol plays a role,” Almeida said.

“However, because of the observational nature of the association between alcohol and depression, and the risk of confounding and bias that comes with observational studies, it is difficult to be entirely certain that the relationship is causal.

“For example, people who drink too much may also smoke, have poor diets and other diseases that could explain the excess number of people with depression among heavy drinkers,” he said.

Almeida and fellow researchers with the Health in Men Study (HIMS), including 12,201 men aged 65-83 when recruited in 1996, decided to search for a causal link via physiological pathways instead: specifically the genetic polymorphism, or mutation, most closely associated with alcohol metabolism.

“We now know that certain genetic variations affect the amount of alcohol people consume. There is one particular genetic variation that affects the enzyme responsible for the metabolism of alcohol,” Almeida said.

“This variation produces an enzyme that is up to 80 times less competent at breaking down alcohol. Consequently, people who carry this variation are much less tolerant to alcohol. In fact, there is now evidence that alcohol-related disorders are very uncommon in this group.

“Now, if alcohol causes depression, then a genetic variation that reduces alcohol use and alcohol-related disorders, should reduce the risk of depression.

“The great advantage of looking at the gene is that this association is not confounded by any other factors – people are born like that,” he said.

The researchers analysed the triangular association between the genetic mutation, alcohol and depression in 3,873 elderly male participants of the study, using data collected over three to eight years.

“We found (as expected) that this particular genetic variant was associated with reduced alcohol use, but it had no association with depression whatsoever,” Almeida said.

“The conclusion is that alcohol use neither causes nor prevents depression in older men. Our results also debunk the view that mild to moderate alcohol consumption may reduce the risk of depression,” he added.