Heart Disease Prevention - Why Quit Smoking And How?

For smokers, lighting up a cigarette is a pleasure but non-smokers find smoking irritating. Smoking can put both smokers and people around them (via second-hand smoke) at a higher risk of developing chronic medical conditions, including heart disease, high blood pressure, lung cancer, and stroke.

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Heart Disease Prevention - Why Quit Smoking And How?

Heart Disease Prevention - Would Low-Nicotine Cigarettes Cut Smoking And Encourage Quitting?

Most people are aware of the health hazards that the smoking can cause and yet many smokers find it hard to quit. This is because tobacco contains nicotine, which is an addictive substance. Some scientists have been pushing for lower levels of nicotine in tobacco as early as in 1990s hoping to help smokers quit and prevent new users from becoming lifelong smokers. And for years, researchers have been testing... Click the following link for more details:

Heart Disease Prevention - Would Low-Nicotine Cigarettes Cut Smoking And Encourage Quitting?

Nicotine-Free Cigarettes On The Way, Are You Sure?

Smoking is bad for the health of smokers as well as non-smokers through second-hand smoke. Besides cancers, nicotine contained in cigarettes can cause heart disease, stroke and many other diseases.

Recently, Japanese researchers had identified a gene that transports nicotine through tobacco plants, which could help manufacture cigarettes free of carcinogen. Carcinogen is a substance or agent that can cause cancer or increase its propagation.

In a joint study by Kyoto University's Research Institute for Sustainable Humanosphere and Ghent University of Belgium, the experts found the gene Nt-JAT1 transports nicotine to vacuoles, or bags accumulating water and other substances in the cells of tobacco leaves. In their experiments, they confirmed that yeast with Nt-JAT1 carry nicotine. They published the results in the online version of the Proceedings of National Academy of Science in January 2009.

Tobacco plants were already known to produce nicotine in their roots and carry it to their leaves. The new finding makes it possible for the cigarette manufacturers to produce tobacco free from nicotine in the leaves.

This would not only help smokers stem nicotine addiction without the use of anti-smoking goods, but also benefit non-smokers as tobacco smoke is free from nicotine. Besides tobacco industry, such discovery could also be used for medical and agricultural purposes.

No one can actually predict whether cigarettes with little or no nicotine would well be accepted by the smokers, but the researchers argued that the gene could also transport compounds, which can be used as medicine.

It has been known that nicotine is part of a group of compounds known as alkaloids. In fact, some alkaloids extracted from plants are employed for fighting cancer. This new discovery could be used to make plants build up higher levels of useful alkaloids.

It is believed that other genes could be involved in carrying nicotine through tobacco plants, but the research on these genes has yet to be completed.

New Way To Predict Heart Disease For Women!

When a person is suspected of having heart disease, he or she would normally be asked to undergo a procedure called angiogram or go for the latest CT scan known as ’64-sliece CT so as to ascertain whether treatment is needed for the potential patient..

However, there is a new way to identify a woman’s heart disease risk by analyzing the nicotine content of her toenail clippings. This new means was revealed in June 2008 in the American Journal of Epidemiology by researchers from the University of California in San Diego.

For the 62,641 women participating in the Nurses' Health Study, researchers correlated their nicotine content in toenail clippings collected in 1982 to the risk of being diagnosed with heart disease between 1984 and 1998.

Women, who were in the top fifth for toenail nicotine content, were thinner, less active, heavier drinkers, more likely to have high blood pressure or diabetes, and a family history of heart attack, comparing with those with lesser nicotine in their toenails. Furthermore, the nicotine content found in the toenails for the 905 women, who had been diagnosed with heart disease, were twice as much on average than those similar women without heart disease. After adjusting for other risk factors, the women in the top fifth for toenail nicotine were nearly 4 times more likely to have heart disease compared to those in the bottom fifth.

The prevailing biomarkers of cigarette smoke exposure such as the amount of cotinine (a nicotine breakdown product) in urine or saliva could only reflect exposure within the past few days. As toenails grow slowly, they may offer a longer-term, more stable estimate of a person's total level of exposure to tobacco smoke.

Toenail analysis could become a useful test to identify high-risk individuals in the future, especially in circumstances where smoking history is unavailable or is subject to bias. Such analysis may also aid our understanding of other tobacco-related illnesses.

As the current study involved only female participants, perhaps future studies should consider including male participants to find out whether similar analysis could be applied to men as well.

A Child's Cardiovascular System May Be At Risk By Secondhand Smoke!

Parents may want to consider giving up their smoking habit as this will harm not only their own bodies but also their children's arteries.

A study, conducted by the Research Centre of Applied and Preventive Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Turku in Finland, measured levels of continine in blood of 400 children between the ages of 8 and 11. Continine is a substance that the body produces when it breaks down nicotine in tobacco smoke. The participants were divided into 3 groups: low, high and non-detectable continine groups.

The researchers reported that exposure, even a little, to secondhand smoke at home or in public can actually harm the function of the cardiovascular system of the healthy children. This is because children who were in the high continine group were found to have a significantly lowered endothelial function. As a measure of arterial health, endothelial function is the blood coagulation and platelet adhesion in the blood vessels.

Parental smoking is also associated with an increased occurrence of asthma and respiratory illness in children. Statistics showed that asthmatic children who are exposed to cigarette smoke at home have a 4.5 times greater risk of respiratory-related absence from school, thus affecting their learning.

Besides cardiovascular disease and asthma, cancer, especially of the lung, is another disease that is strongly associated with secondhand smoke.