A study of 1,718 Chinese children ages 8 to 15 from a rural community, whose mothers had never smoked, showed that youngsters whose fathers smoked had small but detectable deficits in two basic lung function tests. The researchers checked 860 girls and 858 boys in a community along the Yangtze River. Of those tested, 1,374 had fathers who smoked and 344 had fathers who never smoked. No other sources of indoor or outdoor air pollution existed in the rural community.
When the children were divided into two groups by fathers' rate of cigarette consumption, those children of men with the higher level of smoking (over 30 cigarettes per day) had the largest deficits in the two lung function tests.
Moreover, when the data was further examined, nonasthmatic girls showed the greatest deficits in their lung tests. (All data for the children was adjusted by age, sex, weight, height, asthma, and father's educational level.)
The investigators believe the negative impact of paternal smoking had its effect on childhood lung growth rather than on causing airflow obstruction.
Since paternal smoking did not modify the functional relationship between age and height, they believe the observed decreases in pulmonary function represented a lung-specific effect rather than a broader problem related to overall bodily growth.
The study appears in the second of two September issues of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, an official journal of the American Thoracic Society.
(Reference: Scott A. Venners, Xiaobin Wang, Changzhong Chen, Binyan Wang, Jiatong Ni, Yongtang Jin, Jianhua Yang, Zhian Fang, Scott T. Weiss and Xiping XU, Am. J. Respir. Crit. Care Med., Volume 164, Number 6, September 2001, 973-976)
(Editor's Note: Abstract of the paper is available at this URL.)
09-Oct-2001
