Children living in high-stress households are more vulnerable to lung damage from traffic pollution than children whose parents are less stressed out, according to the results of a new study.
"It makes sense," said Dr. Jane Clougherty from the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in this study. "The bodily wear and tear induced by stress could make the individual more susceptible to the effects of traffic-related air pollution."
The researchers took measurements of several indicators of lung function in nearly 1,400 children living in southern California. They also predicted the amount of traffic pollutants the children were exposed to by sampling almost 1,000 different sites around the area. In particular the researchers were looking for nitrogen oxides, which are formed when fuel is burned. Nitrogen oxides can damage lung tissue and make asthma worse, they explain in an article in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.
Six years earlier, the children's parents had filled out a questionnaire about their level of stress. The questions asked how often they felt able to handle personal problems or felt in control, for instance. Air pollution levels varied widely depending on where the children lived, from six parts per billion of nitrogen oxides to 101 parts per billion.
For kids from high-stress homes, when the average amount of nitrogen oxides in the air went up by 22 parts per billion, their lung function got roughly five percent worse.
Return to smoking after heart attack ups death risk
NEW YORK: After a heart attack, quitting smoking may offer a patient more benefits than any medication, but Italian researchers say the flipside is that resuming smoking after leaving the hospital can raise the same patient's risk of dying as much as five-fold.
On average, people who started smoking again after being hospitalised for acute coronary syndrome (ACS) - crushing chest pain that often signals a heart attack - were more than three times as likely to die within a year as people who successfully quit in a study led by Dr. Furio Colivicchi of San Filippo Neri Hospital in Rome.
"Relapse is a major risk factor for long term survival," said Dr. David Katz, associate professor of internal medicine at University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine in Iowa City.
Quitting smoking has a similar lifesaving effect for ACS patients as taking recommended drugs to lower blood pressure or cholesterol, added Katz, who was not involved in the new study.
To gauge the effects of resuming smoking after a heart "event," and to see how many people are likely to relapse, Colivicchi and his colleagues tracked 1294 patients who reported being regular smokers before they were hospitalised with ACS. All the participants had ceased smoking while in the hospital and declared themselves motivated to continue abstaining once they were released. Patients received a few brief smoking-cessation counselling sessions while in the hospital, but no further counselling, nicotine replacement or other smoking-cessation help was provided after they left the hospital.
The researchers interviewed patients about their smoking status at one, six, and 12 months after their release from the hospital and found that a total of 813 (63 percent) had relapsed by the end of the first year. About half had begun smoking again within 20 days of leaving the hospital.
Within a year, 97 patients died, with 81 of those deaths attributed to cardiovascular causes, according to findings published in the American Journal of Cardiology.
After adjusting for patient ages and other variables, the researchers found that resuming smoking raised a person's risk of death three-fold compared to patients who didn't relapse.
The earlier a patient fell off the wagon, the more likely he or she was to die within a year - those who resumed smoking within 10 days of leaving the hospital were five times as likely to die as those who continued to abstain. Very few patients relapsed after being smoke-free for six months. "If you manage to stay off cigarettes for six months, you probably have the addiction beat," said Dr. Nancy Rigotti, director of the Tobacco Research and Treatment Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who was not involved in the study.
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