by NIH Newsbot on Thursday, January 21, 2010
A common lung condition, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) diminishes the heart’s ability to pump effectively even when the disease has no or mild symptoms, according to research published in the Jan. 21 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. The study is the first time researchers have shown strong links between heart function and mild COPD. The research was funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health.
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by Walter Jessen on Thursday, September 25, 2008
The ABC television drama Boston Legal is one of my favorite programs. The show features quick, intelligent dialogue and great performances. Producer David E. Kelly has used Boston Legal as a platform to speak out on a number of issues over the last four seasons. Each installment walks a fine line between entertainment and political/social issues such as the Iraq War, global warming and Hurricane Katrina. Tuesday night’s season premier titled “Smoke Signals” was no exception. In this episode, Kelly tackles big tobacco.
Attorney Alan Shore represents a client who is suing a large tobacco company; her father smoked cigarettes for over 50 years and died of lung cancer. Testifying before the jury, the tobacco company CEO maintained that “we also some good along the way”, asking, “how many industries actually spend money to discourage people from buying their products?” He claimed that “spending billions of dollars on anti-smoking campaigns and youth prevention efforts” is an “unprecedented display of corporate conscience.” In their closing arguments, the defense maintained that there wasn’t conclusive evidence that the tobacco company caused the death of the plaintiff.
Shore delivered powerful closing arguments in the case as only the incomparable James Spader could present. Throughout his closing, he cited research findings and statistics that seemed “made for TV” but are, in fact, very real. In quintessential Highlight HEALTH fashion, I have referenced the studies throughout his closing arguments below. There will only be 12 episodes in this, the fifth and final season of Boston Legal. Enjoy it while you can.
Michael Rhodes smoked cigarettes for 50 years, got lung cancer and died; we all know what happened here. We also all know this death. Everybody in this room knows somebody who has fought this same battle and dies … agonizing, brutal, excruciating …
But … emotion has no play here. Michael Rhodes was eleven years old when he started smoking, it was 1948. At that time, there was no known risk, and even if there were, at eleven he certainly lacked the capacity to assume it. And after that, he was addicted. They manufacture them to be addictive.
In just the last few years, they’ve increased the amount of nicotine in the average cigarette by 11.6% to make them even more addictive [1]. Recently, we learned that tobacco companies have been adding an ammonia-based compound to cigarettes for years to increase absorption of nicotine [2]. It’s basically the same principle used in crack cocaine.
And let’s look at the obscene strategy they’ve employed here. Smoking may cause cancer, but it didn’t cause this particular cancer. It wasn’t our cigarettes, or it was genetic, or asbestos or a paper mill. Never do they take responsibility ever. And God forbid, if you sue them, they’ll bury you and your lawyer. They might even depose your doctor to death, for good measure. All their insidious methods and cunning corporate tactics aren’t just history, it’s what they continue to do now, today. Because the tobacco industry is like a nest of cockroaches, they will always find a way to survive.
They still go after kids with one strategy after another. They put up brightly colored ads at kid’s eye level in convenience stores. They hire gorgeous twenty-somethings to frequent popular venues and seduce young adults into attending lavish corporate-sponsored parties. Cockroaches will always find a way.
They can’t advertise on TV but they’ve hired PR agencies to hook them up with the film industry. And it’s worked. Researchers estimate that smoking in movies delivers nearly 400,000 adolescent smokers every year [3]. Every time you try to kill the cockroach, it finds another way. It has to, because when you make a product that kills off your consumers, you have to find a way to recruit new customers.
They’ve now got a new feminized version of the macho Camel brand using slogans like “lite” and “luscious” with hot pink packaging. Virginia Slims advertised their “thin cigarette”. Allure Magazine did a whole spread on the cigarette diet [4]. They use social and psychological profiling [5], targeting potential smokers by gender, ethnicity, sexual preference, socioeconomic groups … cockroaches don’t discriminate.
Their CEO comes into this courtroom gloating over their anti-smoking campaign, which is designed to get kids to smoke. In 2003, they spent more than 15 billion on advertising and promotion [6]. That’s a 225% increase from 1998, and they have the audacity to declare they’re trying to discourage smoking. This is not how corporations with a conscience behave.
How in God’s name are cigarettes even legal, can anybody tell me that? They are a deadly concoction of carcinogens that damage every single organ in your body. Why do we not ban them? Because it’s a free country, because freedom of choice is an American ideal worth somebody dying every six seconds? How can any company, especially one with such a conscience no less, knowingly manufacture a product that poisons its users? … and make that product look cool and hip and sexy and fun, so they can get children. How can any attorney defend a company that would do such a thing and how could any society tolerate it, but we do.
There is no conscience at big tobacco. There is no conscience in Washington, which has been bought and paid for by this industry. Conscience has to come from you, the jury. If real regulation is to happen, it has to come from you. People are smoking day after day after day and dying and dying and dying and the tobacco companies keep getting richer and richer. Last year alone, they made 12 billion dollars in profits [7]. How can that be?
How can that be?
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by Walter Jessen on Thursday, November 15, 2007
Today, the American Cancer Society (ACS) celebrates the Great American Smokeout, an annual event in the U.S. to encourage Americans to quit smoking. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2006 one in five U.S. adults smoked [1]. The Great American Smokeout challenges those people to smoke less or quit smoking for the day. The event also raises awareness of the many effective ways to quit for good.
The ACS has just wrapped up their first ever video contest on YouTube, where they asked people to create videos – one minute or less – to discourage smoking. You can check out the contest winners at the American Cancer Society.
You can also read more about the harmful effects of smoking and tobacco smoke in these articles here at Highlight HEALTH:
Accept the Great American Smokeout Challenge.
Quit for one day, or quit for good.
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by Walter Jessen on Wednesday, October 24, 2007
We’ve discussed smoking and health a number of times recently:
Ian Gibson asked a question I’m sure many have us have wondered about at one time or another:
Which is worse for the development of lung cancer — smoking heavily over a short period of time or smoking fewer cigarettes over many years?
My answer slowly evolved from a comment to a post of its own. Here’s what the research has to say:
In 2003, researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center created a prediction tool that can assess a long-term smoker’s absolute risk of developing lung cancer within 10 years. How long and how much people have smoked, as well as how long it’s been since their last puff, affect the risk of getting lung cancer.
The formula for the study was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. I’ve linked to the full article since it’s publicly available. The study uses a number of predictors, including age, duration of smoking, average amount smoked per day while smoking and duration of abstinence from smoking (for former smokers) [1]. These predictors are not only identifiable from a clinical history but they are established or strongly suspected risk factors for lung cancer. Additionally, they are also risk factors for all-cause mortality.
Figure 1 models multivariable relations between 1-year lung cancer risk and (A) duration of smoking, (B) average number of cigarettes smoked per day, (C) duration of abstinence and (D) age. In panel A, the relative risk of lung cancer increases exponentially with duration of smoking. In contrast, panel B shows that the relative risk of lung cancer tends to level off between 30 and 60 cigarettes smoked per day.
What does this mean? It means that the relative risk of tobacco-attributable lung cancer sharply increases with increasing duration of smoking, much more so than smoking intensity (i.e. the number of cigarettes smoked per day).
The model for the prediction tool was derived from data collected during CARET, a multicenter, randomized, controlled study that evaluated the impact of beta-carotene and vitamin A supplementation on lung cancer incidence and mortality [2]. Unfortunately, the prediction tool only works for people age 50 and older who smoked at least 10 cigarettes a day for at least 25 years, since those were the people tracked for cancer development in the study.
Further research found that the model described above slightly underestimated the observed risk of lung cancer over 10 years [3]. I choose to write about this particular study because of the accessibility of the online prediction tool. However, other risk models have been developed [4-6].
Additional studies have also suggested that smoking duration has a stronger effect in the prediction of lung cancer risk than number of cigarettes smoked per day [7-10]. These models are consistent with the results from epidemiologic studies, which indicate that risks of lung cancer, as well as bladder cancer, tend to level off with increased smoking intensity [11].
Smoking cessation at any age is beneficial. Nevertheless, lower lung cancer death risk is observed for people who quit at younger ages [12]. Indeed, cessation of smoking prior to middle age is associated with a more than 90% reduction in cancer risk attributed to tobacco [13].
This isn’t to say that smoking intensity isn’t a major contributor to tobacco-attributable cancer risk. However, the take-home message is that long-term smoking clearly impacts lung cancer risk to a greater extent. That’s why it’s more important than ever to quit smoking now.
Did you ever smoke? How long were you a smoker? At what age did you quit?
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