(Press-News.org) When smoking was banned from casinos in Colorado, ambulance calls to casinos in Gilpin County dropped about 20 percent, according to research reported in the American Heart Association journal Circulation.
The drop in calls from casinos was similar to drops in ambulance calls from elsewhere two years earlier when Colorado banned smoking everywhere but casinos.
How did the smoking ban lead to a reduction in ambulance calls? Partially by eliminating exposure to secondhand smoke, said Stanton Glantz, Ph.D., the study's lead author.
"Inhaling secondhand smoke increases the chances of blood clots than can block arteries and makes it more difficult for arteries to expand properly, changes that can trigger heart attacks," said Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education and professor of medicine in the division of cardiology at the University of California, San Francisco. "The calls may also have decreased due to smokers not being able to smoke in the casinos, thus avoiding the immediate toxic effects of smoke on their blood and blood vessels and because some people quit smoking."
For this study, the first to examine the health impact of smoking bans in casinos, researchers focused on the number of ambulance calls in Gilpin County, Colorado, a tourist destination with 26 casinos – the largest concentration in the state.
Smoking was banned from public locations, including workplaces, restaurants and bars in Colorado in 2006, and ambulance calls to those locations went down 22.8 percent. Casinos, however, were exempt from the ban and their ambulance calls remained about the same.
Then, in 2008, smoking was extinguished at the casinos, too, and ambulance calls there dropped by 19.1 percent, while there was no further change at the other facilities.
"The fact that there were changes only at the time the law changed in both venues is strong evidence that the law is what caused the change in ambulance calls," according to Glantz.
"Casinos are often exempted from legislation mandating smoke-free environments, putting employees and patrons at risk for heart attacks, strokes, asthma attacks and other adverse events triggered by secondhand smoke," Glantz said. "The message to policymakers is clear: stop granting casino exemptions. They lead to a substantial number of people being sent to the hospital, often at taxpayer expense, something that is completely preventable."
As of spring 2013, 20 states have laws that require smoke-free gambling facilities, while another 28 states have state-regulated gambling but only partial or no smoke-free laws, Glantz said. These laws do not cover casinos on American Indian and Alaska native soil; only a few of those are smoke-free, he said.
"For decades the American Heart Association has strongly supported laws that require indoor public places and workplaces to be smoke-free," said Nancy Brown, CEO of the American Heart Association. "We applaud Colorado lawmakers for protecting casino workers and patrons and encourage more states and Native American tribes to follow suit."
The study did not have information on outcomes of the ambulance calls or detailed information on patients, so researchers could not differentiate events related to smoking or secondhand smoke from other emergencies.
"My advice for people with heart disease is to make your home smoke free and don't visit casinos or other venues with secondhand smoke," Glantz said.
INFORMATION:
The National Cancer Institute funded the study.
Erin Gibbs, deputy director of the Gilpin Ambulance Authority, is co-author of the study. Author disclosures are on the manuscript.
Read more on how the association is building a tobacco-free nation. Why you should quit smoking.
For the latest heart and stroke news, follow us on Twitter: @HeartNews.
Statements and conclusions of study authors published in American Heart Association scientific journals are solely those of the study authors and do not necessarily reflect the association's policy or position. The association makes no representation or guarantee as to their accuracy or reliability. The association receives funding primarily from individuals; foundations and corporations (including pharmaceutical, device manufacturers and other companies) also make donations and fund specific association programs and events. The association has strict policies to prevent these relationships from influencing the science content. Revenues from pharmaceutical and device corporations are available at http://www.heart.org/corporatefunding.
END
NEW YORK, NY (August 5, 2013) — A team of researchers at the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at Columbia University Medical Center has identified 18 new genes responsible for driving glioblastoma multiforme, the most common—and most aggressive—form of brain cancer in adults. The study was published August 5, 2013, in Nature Genetics.
"Cancers rely on driver genes to remain cancers, and driver genes are the best targets for therapy," said Antonio Iavarone, MD, professor of pathology and neurology at Columbia University Medical Center and a principal author ...
NEW YORK, August 5, 2013 – With physicians facing increasing demands on their time, it can be extremely difficult to prioritize which preventive care methods should be used for their patients. Now, two researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center have developed a mathematical model that will save time, lead to enhanced care, and potentially save lives.
The two researchers, Glen Taksler, PhD and Scott Braithwaite, MD, MSc, have co-authored the lead article in the August 6th issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, entitled "Personalized Estimates of Benefit from Preventive Care ...
An iconic moment in the history of Hollywood movie magic was born in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz when Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale stepped out of the black and white world of Kansas into the rainbow colored world of Oz. An iconic moment in the history of infrared imaging may have been born with the announcement of the first technique to offer full color IR tomography.
A collaboration between researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) has combined Fourier Transform ...
If history's closest analog is any indication, the look of the oceans will change drastically in the future as the coming greenhouse world alters marine food webs and gives certain species advantages over others.
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, paleobiologist Richard Norris and colleagues show that the ancient greenhouse world had few large reefs, a poorly oxygenated ocean, tropical surface waters like a hot tub, and food webs that did not sustain the abundance of large sharks, whales, seabirds, and seals of the modern ocean. Aspects of this greenhouse ...
Researchers from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) and from the MPI Dortmund have for the first time successfully reproduced the recycling process of proteins regulating cellular transport in a biophysical experiment. In doing so, they traced in detail the way the central switch protein Rab is being extracted from the lipid membrane. The team of PD Dr Carsten Kötting, Prof Dr Klaus Gerwert (Department of Biophysics, RUB) and Prof Dr Roger S. Goody (Max Planck Institute for Molecular Physiology, Dortmund) has published the spectroscopic and dynamic data in the PNAS journal's ...
A combination of brain scans and reading tests has revealed that several regions in the brain are responsible for allowing humans to read.
The findings open up the possibility that individuals who have difficulty reading may only need additional training for specific parts of the brain – targeted therapies that could more directly address their individual weaknesses.
"Reading is a complex task. No single part of the brain can do all the work," said Qinghua He, postdoctoral research associate at the USC Brain and Creativity Institute and the first author of a study on ...
Conventional wisdom holds that East Africa's Maasai pastoralists hunt lions for two distinct reasons: to retaliate against lions that kill livestock or to engage in a cultural rite of passage. But that view reflects mistranslations of Maasai terms and a simplification of their cultural traditions and their relationship with wildlife, a team of researchers led by a University of Colorado Boulder geographer has concluded.
Further, some conservation initiatives including those designed to save lions from being hunted have either failed to work or in some cases appear to ...
The global treaty that headed off destruction of earth's protective ozone layer has also prevented major disruption of global rainfall patterns, even though that was not a motivation for the treaty, according to a new study in the Journal of Climate.
The 1987 Montreal Protocol phased out the use of chloroflourocarbons, or CFCs, a class of chemicals that destroy ozone in the stratosphere, allowing more ultraviolet radiation to reach earth's surface. Though the treaty aimed to reverse ozone losses, the new research shows that it also protected the hydroclimate. The study ...
Aug. 5, 2013 - For a new study in the Journal of Animal Science, researchers evaluated how different concentrations of lipids affect growth performance in weaned pigs. The researchers also studied how different sources of lipids affect pigs.
According to the researchers, it is important to re-evaluate energy density and nutrient absorption because swine genetics have improved over the years.
Dr. Olayiwola Adeola, animal science professor at Purdue University, said small pigs have an issue with intestinal capacity to consume enough energy. This means that the intestines ...
Stem cells found in mouth tissue can not only become other types of cells but can also relieve inflammatory disease, according to a new Ostrow School of Dentistry of USC study in the Journal of Dental Research.
The cells featured in the study are gingival mesenchymal stem cells (GMSC), which are found in the gingiva, or gum tissue, within the mouth. GMSC, like other stem cells, have the ability to develop into different types of cells as well as affect the immune system.
"Gingiva is very unique in our body," says Professor Songtao Shi, the study's senior author. "It ...
