As if you need another reason not to smoke… or to avoid the effects of secondhand smoke, a groundbreaking study in Diabetes Care finds that cigarette smoke brings a higher risk of type 2 diabetes, both for the smoker and for the non smokers around them. The risk goes up the more secondhand smoke you’re exposed to.
Head of the Diabetes Center at Mass General Hospital, Dr. David Nathan, tells us that the risks of diabetes from secondhand smoke weren’t known before, but that these findings reinforce the lesson that you need to limit your exposure.
Tobacco smoke has over 4,000 chemicals, and more than 60% of them are known to cause cancer.
Secondhand smoke is a combination of two forms of smoke that come from burning tobacco – sidestream smoke (from the end of the lighted cigarette, pipe or cigar) and mainstream smoke (exhaled from the smoker’s mouth).
It’s the sidestream smoke that has higher concentrations of the cancer causing substances than the smoke that comes from the smoker.
For the research, Dr. John P. Forman out of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and his colleagues examined the responses of over 100,000 women to questionnaires answered back in 1982.
The subjects were all female, all nurses taking part in a nationwide study known as the Nurses’ Health Study that lasted several decades, supplied information on how much time they spend around cigarette smoke.
Over the next 24 years, about one in 18 subjects was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.
The team found that women who smoked over two packs a day had the highest rates of developing diabetes. For every 10,000 subjects in the study, about 30 of the heavy smokers were diagnosed with diabetes each year, compared to about 25 women who didn’t smoke, and hadn’t been exposed to others cigarette smoke.
The risks were higher for ex-smokers and women who were exposed to secondhand smoke. In both groups, about 39 of every 10,000 women were diagnosed with diabetes each year. Once the research team took factors like weight status, age, and family history into account, the ex-smokers had a 12% higher risk of diabetes compared to those who were regularly exposed to secondhand smoke.
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Secondhand Smoke Linked To Higher Risk Of This Chronic Disease… Continued…
No one knows why secondhand smoke and type 2 diabetes might be connected, though inflammation might be a part of the picture.
Type 2 diabetes is the form that usually develops in adults, affecting both men and women equally, and is a chronic condition where the body can’t process sugar properly. Sometimes patients can control their condition with diet and exercise, while more advanced disease calls for insulin. Diabetes that goes unmanaged, or poorly managed, brings the risks of many dangerous, life-altering complications.
The researchers believe there’s no reason to think the findings would not apply to men because the risk factors for diabetes are the same for both men and women. Today the danger of the effects of secondhand smoke is well recognized, and federal, state and local authorities are enacting clean indoor air ordinances to protect nonsmokers from health problems, like type 2 diabetes, that may come from exposure to secondhand smoke.
