Secondhand Smoke Exposure Can Cause Cell Damage In 30 Minutes

According to a new study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, exposure to secondhand smoke even for a brief period of which was stated to be 30 minutes was dangerous to health. The original article explained that inhaling such could result to blood vessel injury in young and other healthy lifelong nonsmokers. However, the article added that it was not only injury to blood vessels but also exposure to smoke hampers the normal functioning of the body’s natural repair mechanisms. They have strong and persistent consequences on the body’s vascular system. These effects would usually surface after twenty four hours.

To give a clearer picture of how this study was made, the article included subjects being exposed to carefully controlled levels of secondhand smoke which was equivalent to being in a bar where smoking was permitted. This was true for fifty one percent of the US population and in other countries, such as Germany. The same subjects were given the chance to get exposed to clean air on a different day.

In all of these experiments, the subjects’ blood vessels health were also evaluated by the researchers. This was done through ultrasound to measure blood flow and analysis of blood samples. In the exposure environment, this was done before exposure to establish baseline measures, immediately after exposure, and then one hour, two and a half hours and twenty four hours after exposure. Ten young adults between the ages of twenty nine and thirty one were chosen as subjects of the study.

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The article also highlighted that such study was the first of its kind to connect injury to blood vessels with the decreased efficacy of the body’s own repair mechanism which was the endothelial progenitor cells or EPCs. EPCs play an important role in the repair mechanism of injured blood vessels.

The following were the three effects of secondhand smoke exposure examined by the researchers, as discussed by the original article. These are being elaborated in toto, namely: the effect of smoke on the mechanical function of blood vessels; whether they could detect particles in the blood that are known to be increased in the blood due to blood vessel injury, and lastly, whether there was any effect on the stem cells (EPCs) that comprise the body’s blood vessel repair mechanisms.

Yerem Yeghiazrians, MD and director of the Translational Cardiac Stem Cell Program at UCSF said that short second hand smoke exposure not only resulted in blood vessel injury but made the EPCs dysfunctional. As was discussed in the original article, EPCs are the body’s own repair mechanisms. This would result in a double injury, since a person does not only acquire blood vessel injury but the cells which are supposed to help repair this damage are also made dysfunctional.

The article further conveyed that laws mandating smokefree workplaces, restaurants and bars in cities and states could lead to a twenty percent drop in hospital admissions for heart attacks. The study suggested that there was no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke. The original article elaborated the different investigators to this study.