14 DAY TRIAL // A new investigation has revealed that the children of smokers exhibit traces of carcinogens generally found in tobacco in their urine, in amounts that are significantly higher than in their peers whose parents do not smoke.
The research found that the correlation held true for 90 percent of all children whose parents smoked. Details of the work were presented between November 7-10 in Philadelphia, at the Ninth AACR Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research Conference.
One of the most interesting conclusions of the study was that the affected children had about 8 percent the level of tobacco metabolites as their smoking parents. This is a very high percentage for the young ones, researchers say.
“This finding is striking, because while all of the researchers involved in this study expected some level of exposure to carcinogens, the average levels were higher than what we anticipated,” said at the conference Jane L. Thomas, PhD, the lead researcher in the investigation.
She holds an appointment as an assistant professor of behavioral medicine at the University of Minnesota. The expert adds that adult non-smokers tend to exhibit 1 to 5 percent the metabolite concentration level of their smoking peers.
What is very worrying is that the effects that cumulative exposure to these chemicals might have on the human body have not yet been analyzed in detail, and over long periods of timje.
“It could prime the body in some way that leads to DNA changes in cells that might contribute to lung damage, and potentially lung cancer,” Thomas says, quoted by experts at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR).
Throughout the researchers, scientists discovered that the number of cigarettes parents consumed daily could be directly linked to the amount of tobacco metabolites their children had in their urine.
What the team hopes to accomplish through this investigation is to make parents who smoke more aware of the harm they are doing to their children, and to use that as leverage in getting the adults to ban smoking in the household.
“Almost one third of young children in the United States live in a house with at least one smoker. My concern is that parents and family members may not truly understand the risk they pose to these children,” Thomas reveals.
“Based on these results, there is little doubt that total [metabolite levels] in the urine of children could be substantially reduced by home smoking restrictions,” the expert adds.
“We need to act now to ensure that all parents have the facts they need to make informed decisions to protect their families from this completely preventable health hazard,” she concludes.