PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Thirdhand smoke: Toxic airborne pollutants linger long after the smoke clears

Berkeley Lab researchers assess health impacts of inhalable constituents of thirdhand tobacco smoke.

Thirdhand smoke: Toxic airborne pollutants linger long after the smoke clears
2014-11-03
(Press-News.org) Ever walked into a hotel room and smelled old cigarette smoke? While the last smoker may have left the room hours or even days ago, the lingering odors—resulting from noxious residue that clings to walls, carpets, furniture, or dust particles—are thanks to thirdhand smoke.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), who have made important findings on the dangers of thirdhand smoke and how it adsorbs strongly onto indoor surfaces, have published a new study assessing the health effects of thirdhand smoke constituents present in indoor air. Looking at levels of more than 50 volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and airborne particles for 18 hours after smoking had taken place, they found that thirdhand smoke continues to have harmful health impacts for many hours after a cigarette has been extinguished.

"In the U.S., the home is now where nonsmokers are most exposed to second- and thirdhand smoke. The goal of our study is to provide information supporting effective protective measures in the home. The amount of harm is measurable even several hours after smoking ends," said chemist Hugo Destaillats, lead author of the study. "Many smokers know secondhand smoke is harmful, so they don't smoke when their kids are present. But if, for example, they stop smoking at 2 p.m. and the kids come home at 4 p.m., our work shows that up to 60 percent of the harm from inhaling thirdhand smoke remains."

Their study, "Inhalable Constituents of Thirdhand Tobacco Smoke: Chemical Characterization and Health Impact Considerations," has been published online in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. Other co-authors were Berkeley Lab scientists Mohamad Sleiman, Jennifer Logue, and Lara Gundel, and Portland State University professor James F. Pankow and researcher Wentai Luo.

The Berkeley Lab team has done previous studies establishing the formation of harmful thirdhand smoke constituents by reaction of nicotine with indoor nitrous acid, showing that nicotine can react with ozone to form potentially harmful ultrafine particles, and finding that thirdhand smoke can cause genetic damage in human cells. These studies focused primarily on chemical contaminants adsorbed to indoor surfaces, entering the human body through dermal uptake or ingestion of dust. The new study focuses on a third type of exposure, inhalation. The study shows that this route of exposure, even after the smoke dissipates, is also significant.

The team collected data from two environments: one was a room-sized chamber at Berkeley Lab where six cigarettes were machine-smoked and levels of particulate matter and 58 VOCs were monitored during an aging period of 18 hours; the second was a smoker's home, where field measurements were made 8 hours after the last cigarette was smoked. Logue led the health analysis, using an impact assessment approach that she has used for studying indoor air pollutants.

Health data was available for only about half of the measured chemicals. For those Logue used a metric called DALY, or disability-adjusted life year, to quantify the health impact. The DALY is commonly used by the World Health Organization (WHO) and others in the public health field as a way to combine loss of life with loss of quality of life in a single metric.

Looking at DALYs lost as a function of time, the study found that the total integrated harm rises sharply in the first five hours after a cigarette has been smoked, continues to rise for another five hours, and doesn't start to level off until after 10 hours.

"We ranked the health damage due to each of the pollutants for which we had data," Logue said. "We found that particulate matter, or PM2.5, accounted for 90 percent of the health damage."

PM2.5, or particles that are less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, can be inhaled deeply into the lungs and cause serious health problems. The study identified also those tobacco VOCs with the highest health impacts, some of which exceeded concentrations considered harmful by the state of California over the entire 18-hour period.

The researchers caution that this was an initial scoping study, in which they had to rely on health data available for outdoor air particles. Common outdoor sources include vehicle exhaust, forest fires, and burning of fuels. "Tobacco particles have a different composition than outdoor air particles, but there are chemical similarities," Gundel said. "This is a first-order approximation."

Another purpose of the study was to better understand the transition between secondhand smoke and thirdhand smoke. Depending on the criteria used, the predicted health damage caused by thirdhand smoke could range from 5 percent to 60 percent of the total harm. "A lot of the harm attributed to secondhand smoke could be due to thirdhand smoke," Gundel said. "Because there's a gradual transition from one to the other, we don't really know yet what the chronic effects of thirdhand smoke are."

INFORMATION:

The study is part of a research agenda developed by the California Consortium on Thirdhand Smoke, which was established in 2011 largely as a result of work published in 2010 by Destaillats, Gundel, Sleiman, and others. The Consortium, which includes researchers from Berkeley Lab, UC San Francisco, UC Riverside, the University of Southern California, and San Diego State University, is funded by the Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program, managed by the University of California. Its goals are better understanding the health effects of thirdhand smoke, identifying the most effective control policies and practices to protect nonsmokers, and developing methods to remediate indoor environments contaminated with thirdhand smoke.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory addresses the world's most urgent scientific challenges by advancing sustainable energy, protecting human health, creating new materials, and revealing the origin and fate of the universe. Founded in 1931, Berkeley Lab's scientific expertise has been recognized with 13 Nobel prizes. The University of California manages Berkeley Lab for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. For more, visit http://www.lbl.gov. DOE's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.


[Attachments] See images for this press release:
Thirdhand smoke: Toxic airborne pollutants linger long after the smoke clears

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

New study shows women have higher risk of injury than men

2014-11-03
A new study of emergency department patients in 18 countries, made available online today by the scientific journal Addiction, shows that the risk of injury caused by acute alcohol consumption is higher for women compared with men. While the risk of injury is similar for both men and women up to three 'standard' drinks (containing 16 ml or 12.8 g of pure ethanol), the risk then increases more rapidly for women, becoming twice the risk to men around 15 drinks and three times the risk to men around 30 drinks. In this study the drinks were reportedly consumed within six ...

Smoking is a pain in the back

2014-11-03
CHICAGO --- If you want to avoid chronic back pain, put out the cigarette. A new Northwestern Medicine® study has found that smokers are three times more likely than nonsmokers to develop chronic back pain, and dropping the habit may cut your chances of developing this often debilitating condition. "Smoking affects the brain," said Bogdan Petre, lead author of the study and a technical scientist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. "We found that it affects the way the brain responds to back pain and seems to make individuals less resilient to an ...

Study shows clear new evidence for mind-body connection

2014-11-03
For the first time, researchers have shown that practising mindfulness meditation or being involved in a support group has a positive physical impact at the cellular level in breast cancer survivors. A group working out of Alberta Health Services' Tom Baker Cancer Centre and the University of Calgary Department of Oncology has demonstrated that telomeres – protein complexes at the end of chromosomes – maintain their length in breast cancer survivors who practise meditation or are involved in support groups, while they shorten in a comparison group without ...

Biosimilar drugs could create billions in health care savings, study finds

2014-11-03
Introducing competing "biosimilar" versions of complex biologic drugs used to treat illnesses such as cancer and rheumatoid arthritis could cut spending on biologics in the United States by $44 billion over the next decade, according to new analysis from the RAND Corporation. While biologics have advanced medical treatment for many conditions, they often are expensive and patient copays for some biologics can be several thousand dollars per year. In 2011, eight of the top 20 drugs in the United States in terms of sales were biologics and the annual spending on the drugs ...

Pain and depression place older adults at risk of delirium following surgery

2014-11-03
BOSTON—New research reports that preoperative pain and depressive symptoms in older adults place them at greater risk of delirium following surgery. According to the findings published today in The Lancet Psychiatry journal, both pain and depression are independent and interactive risk factors for delirium, suggesting a cumulative effect. Individuals with delirium experience a sharp decline in attention and mental function. Older adults are especially susceptible to delirium following surgery, occurring in up to 51% of surgical patients 65 and older. Moreover, depression ...

Dance choreography improves girls' computational skills

Dance choreography improves girls computational skills
2014-11-03
Clemson researchers find that blending movement and computer programming supports girls in building computational thinking skills, according to an ongoing study funded by the National Science Foundation and emerging technology report published in journal Technology, Learning and Knowledge. Even with increasing demands for computationally savvy workers, there is a lack of representation among women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields (STEM), the researchers say. "We want more diverse faces around the table, helping to come up with technological ...

Even when you're older you need chaperones

2014-11-03
Aging is the most significant and universal risk factor for developing neurodegenerative diseases, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases. This risk increases disproportionately with age, but no one really knows why. Now a team of scientists from Northwestern University, Proteostasis Therapeutics, Inc. and Harvard University has uncovered some clues. The researchers are the first to find that the quality of protective genes called molecular chaperones declines dramatically in the brains of older humans, both ...

Coenzyme Q10 helps veterans battle Gulf War illness symptoms

2014-11-03
Roughly one-third of the 700,000 United States troops who fought in the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War have subsequently developed a distinct set of chronic health problems, dubbed Gulf War illness. Their symptoms, from fatigue, muscle pain and weakness to decreased cognitive function and gastrointestinal and skin problems, persist decades after the conflict. In a study published in the Nov. 1 issue of Neural Computation, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine report that a high quality brand of coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) – a compound ...

Hurricane Vance dwarfs developing low pressure area

Hurricane Vance dwarfs developing low pressure area
2014-11-03
NOAA's GOES-West satellite captured an image of Hurricane Vance and a much smaller developing low pressure area in the Eastern Pacific Ocean on Nov. 3. Vance's tropical-storm force winds extended to about 250 miles in diameter. NOAA's GOES-West satellite captured an infrared image of the Eastern Pacific that showed Hurricane Vance was a couple of times larger than the developing low pressure area known as System 94E to the southeast of the hurricane. In the GOES image, taken Nov. 3 at 1200 UTC (7 a.m. EST/4 a.m. PST) clouds and showers extending from Vance's northern ...

Gender fairness prevails in most fields of academic science

2014-11-03
Women are significantly underrepresented in many science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, and attempts to understand why have only resulted in disagreement among researchers, the lay public, and policymakers. In a comprehensive new report, an interdisciplinary team of psychological scientists and economists aims to cut through the confusion, synthesizing available research and providing a host of new analyses to identify the factors that drive women's underrepresentation in STEM. Their analyses show that, despite many differences between the sexes prior ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Scientists use AI to better understand nanoparticles

We feed gut microbes sugar, they make a compound we need

One of the largest psychotherapy trials in the world has implications for transforming mental health care during pregnancy and after birth

It’s not just what you say – it’s also how you say it

Sleep patterns may reveal comatose patients with hidden consciousness

3D genome structure guides sperm development

Certain genetic alterations may contribute to the primary resistance of colorectal and pancreatic cancers to KRAS G12C inhibitors

Melting Antarctic ice sheets will slow Earth’s strongest ocean current

Hallucinogen use linked to 2.6-fold increase in risk of death for people needing emergency care

Pathogenicity threshold of SCA6 causative gene CACNA1A was identified

Mysterious interstellar icy objects

Chronic diseases misdiagnosed as psychosomatic can lead to long term damage to physical and mental wellbeing, study finds

Omalizumab treats multi-food allergy better than oral immunotherapy

Sleep apnea linked to increased risk of Parkinson’s, but CPAP may reduce risk

New insights into drug addiction: The role of astrocytic G protein-coupled receptors

Digital twin technology: Transforming road engineering and its lifecycle applications

Next-generation AI and big data: Transforming crop breeding

Biomimetic synthesis of natural products: Progress, challenges and prospects

New limits found for dark matter properties from latest search

SCAI expresses disappointment over ABMS decision to deny independent cardiovascular medicine boar

Rice researchers develop efficient lithium extraction method, setting stage for sustainable EV battery supply chains

Statement on ABMS denying new cardiovascular board

St. Jude scientists solve mystery of how the drug retinoic acid works to treat neuroblastoma

New device could allow you to taste a cake in virtual reality

Illinois researchers develop next-generation organic nanozymes and point-of-use system for food and agricultural uses

Kicking yourself: Going against one’s better judgment amplifies self-blame

Rice researchers harness gravity to create low-cost device for rapid cell analysis

Revolutionary copper-infused microvesicles: a new era in biofunctional medicine

Primary care practices with NPs are key to increasing health care access in less advantaged areas, Columbia Nursing study shows

TTUHSC conducting study to help patients that experience traumatic blood loss

[Press-News.org] Thirdhand smoke: Toxic airborne pollutants linger long after the smoke clears
Berkeley Lab researchers assess health impacts of inhalable constituents of thirdhand tobacco smoke.