Parents' smoking 'damages kid's veins'

[onehandle]

Source: AAP

Damage from passive smoking can be found in the blood vessels of children just 10 years old. Parents who smoke in the home can cause their child's arteries to show signs of clogging and hardening, dramatically raising their overall life-time risk of heart attack.

A German study which looked at almost 400 10-year-olds found those with smoking parents could also have emerging signs of atherosclerosis. Earlier research has shown a link between second-hand smoke and the condition in adults.

"To show that in healthy 10-year-old kids they've got these increased markers of what we normally associate with a really bad risk of heart attack is alarming," Australian atherosclerosis expert Professor David Celermajer said in reaction to the study.

"This is from being exposed to passive smoke from their parents all their lives. "These children are not about to drop dead when they're 11 or 12 but it indicates they're a three or four-fold higher risk of heart attack in their 40s or 50s."

Read more: http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/-/latest/5749920/parents-smoking-damages-kids-veins/

[mayahbird]

1. And just think

If the tobacco companies hadn't run a campaign against Clinton when he was trying to get elected, we would have never found out about all this second hand smoke.

[ElboRuum]

2. YAY! A smoking thread!!!

Oh... wait...

[gratuitous]

3. It's a feature, not a bug

Kids who grow up to die from heart disease in their 40s or 50s will put much less strain on an already overburdened health care system. Thanks again, Big Tobacco!

[Odin2005]

4. How long before the smoking apologists accuse this of being junk science?

:eyes:

[Javaman]

5. 3,2,1...

:popcorn:

[boppers]

15. "However, longitudinal studies are necessary to determine the potential causal relevance"

Prior studies showed reversals after two years, this seems to contradict that, so more studies are needed.
http://eurheartj.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/ehp180

You're welcome.

:evilgrin:

[Javaman]

25. Um, what? nt

[ElboRuum]

6. What is a smoking apologist?

Seriously, what does that even mean?

It never occurred to me once to even begin to have the idea of having the merest scintilla of inclination to conceptualize the very act of formulating an apology for smoking, let alone actually beginning to start to plan to conceive of the idea for the introduction of the briefest of verbalizations for such an apology, should there have been one, which there wasn't.

:popcorn:

I await with palpable suspense to the point of giddy anticipation at having a genuine "smoking apologist" appear before me so that I might have a suitable exemplar. Mine eyes shall be wide with wonder.

[Odin2005]

16. Selfish people who think their "right" to smoke is more important than,,,

people with sensitivities to tobacco smoke being able to go to the bar with friends.

[ElboRuum]

17. Ahh, I see.

The "right" to smoke vs. the "right" to go to a bar.

I was right to pop the corn... this will be a fun one!

[Robb]

24. They're both near the bottom, by the signatures. nt

[SteelPenguin]

7. 100 Studies Could Come Out

...and I could go outside and drive around and sooner rather than later I'll see people in a car smoking cigarettes, with their kids in the backseats bouncing around without carseats. I used to wonder what went through people's heads who did stuff like that, and I met one last week.

Stupid is as stupid does.

[tblue37]

9. In the good old days, kids were not in the back seat in carseats.

I was always in the front seat between my chain smoking parents.

[SteelPenguin]

11. I Never Wore a Helmet!

You know what really touches a nerve with me? When someone says "When I was a kid I never wore a helmet riding a bike and I was fine."

When I was 15 a friend of mine was riding their bike, didn't see a small pothole and it catapaulted them off their bike and into the curb. They weren't wearing a helmet. The kids who died not wearing helmets aren't around today to say "When I was a kid I never wore a helmet riding a bike and I'm dead now because of it."

[Danmel]

12. A kid I went to grade school with

Had a brother who was hit by a car when he was 9 and was in a coma for a month. He had permanent brain damage. His brother became a neurologist.

[tblue37]

14. When I was about 10, a friend of my sister's, 14 at the

time, died after being thrown from her bike and hitting her head on a rock.

Just last month, Bob Frederick, the very popular former athletic director at KU, died after being thrown from his bike when he hit a rough patch of road that had not been smoothed over after utility work. As it happens, Frederick actually was wearing a helmet at the time, but his head injury was so severe that he died anyway, despite being life-flighted to the hospital.

People should not assume that the sort of head injury one can get from riding a bike are insignificant.

My comment about the car seats was not meant to suggest that it is okay for kids to ride around without car seats (it's not, of course), just to indicate that back then, kids (like me) weren't even that far from their parents' smoke, since there were no car seats and no laws saying kids had to be in the (safer) back seat of the car.

[SteelPenguin]

21. No I gotcha

Didn't mean to imply otherwise. My wife was like you. Middle of the front seat with two parent smokers. Your post just made me think of the rationalizers, not saying that you were one.

[Bigmack]

19. Can't RESIST a reply to this one...

I probably ride my bike around 2,500 miles a year. In 2001 my front tire went into an "invisible" - it was dusk and the pothole was Not marked up by cracks or ANYTHING - pothole, the front tire locked up, and I flew over the handle bars. I landed on my head - coma - airlifted to the hospital, the whole 10 yards. This occurred about 3 blocks from my home, on a road I'd ridden on 100 times. ALL the doctors agreed that my helmet SAVED MY LIFE. Of course there was some brain damage - you're never the same after you bonk your beaner - but I still love life - love riding my bike, but I'm RELIGIOUS now about the helmet thing! I was before the accident, but I'm a crusader now.... Ms Bigmack

[Arugula Latte]

23. Exactly. That "neverworeahelmet" thing is such a bullshit "argument" and I'm bloody sick of it.

My son's best friend was grazed by an SUV while he was on his bike (SUV swerved into the bike lane). My son's friend is alive and well. His brain is completely intact. His helmet did not fare as well -- it had a giant crack in it and had to be thrown out.

[Javaman]

26. My own story...

If I hadn't worn a helmet, I would probably be dead today.

On my 30th birthday, many moons ago, I was doing my morning ride. It was a sunday roughly at 630am. I was basically the only person on the street.

I saw a parked car ahead of me an went to move around it. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a white door with a black stripe. That's the last thing I remember just before it cut me off into that same parked car.

It launched me over the handle bars into the car. My helmet did it's job and absorbed the blow. It fractured into a few pieces. Don't get me wrong, I was still screwed up. Broke my cheek bone, almost lost my sight in my right eye and again, almost lost all my front teeth on the right side of my mouth, but I was alive.

Today, aside from a scar on the right side of my face, I am alive, I can see and I still have all my teeth.

The helmet saved my life.

[tblue37]

8. My parents were chimneys. As the smallest child, I had to sit

in the front seat of the car between them, breathing intheir smoke. They smoked around all of us constantly.

I am 59 years old next month, a nonsmoker, but already I have BP problems, heart problems and have suffered several TIAs.

I have often wondered whetehr all that passive smoking might have contributed to my health problems.

[hollowdweller]

10. The old lady I bought my farm from

Had emphysema really bad. Her husband died in the 60's or 70's of lung cancer and was a heavy smoker but she never smoked.

Known several non smoking musicians with emphysema from playing in bars.

[RobinA]

13. Well...

MY grandmother is 99 1/2, her father smoked, her husband smoked, her son smoked, yet somehow she soldiers on. Will die in her sleep having worn the heck out.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

18. Yep. My mom died of lung cancer but my dad had mild emphysema till the day he died.

400,000 plus deaths a year from smoking and we always get some anti-science douche-bag who shows up in these threads with anecdotal evidence of their 90 year old chain-smoking grandma who is healthy as a horse.

I have five good friends who lost parents to lung cancer. I lost my mom to it. Two of my mom's "smoking buddies" died from it and the other one has emphysema and congestive heart failure. My dad had emphysema.

One of the saddest parts of my mom's passing was watching her beat herself up over taking up the habit in the first place when she realized she was going to miss out on the grand kids .. :cry: Of course, we consoled her but I couldn't help but remember the times I cried myself to sleep as a child after we had "anti-smoking" lessons in school - When I was a kid I just KNEW she would get cancer.

[StarryNite]

20. I can relate

Sounds like my childhood living with smokers too. I turned 59 last April and I have often wondered if having been a passive smoker when I was a kid would ever catch up to me. So far I've dodged the bullet but that doesn't mean it won't get me eventually. The one good thing that came from living with smokers was that the last thing I ever wanted to do was to smoke. I hated the smell of that shit!

[mainer]

22. Headline is incorrect. Should say "damages arteries"

Since it's arterial damage we worry about.