Smoker’s children have damaged veins
Damage from passive smoking can be found in the blood vessels of children just 10 years old, research has found.
Parents who smoke in the home can cause their child’s arteries to show signs of clogging and hardening, dramatically raising their overall life-time risk of heart attack.
A German study which took in almost 400 10-year-olds found those with smoking parents could also have emerging signs of atherosclerosis.
Earlier research has shown a link between second-hand smoke and the condition in adults.
“To show that in healthy 10-year-old kids they’ve got these increased markers of what we normally associate with a really bad risk of heart attack is alarming,” Australian atherosclerosis expert Professor David Celermajer said when asked of the study.
“This is from being exposed to passive smoke from their parents all their lives. These children are not about to drop dead when they’re 11 or 12 but it indicates they’re a three or four-fold higher risk of heart attack in their 40s or 50s.”
Prof Celermajer, of Sydney University and Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, says an Australian study conducted in 1996 also found evidence of blood vessel damage in 15-year-olds who were exposed to passive smoke in the home.
He says while research suggested these ill effects could be reversed within two years if the child lived in a smoke-free house, for many the ramifications of parental smoking were life-long.
“I see a lot of people with heart attacks in their 40s and 50s, who have no risk factors at all except having exposure to passive smoke in childhood,” Prof Celermajer says.
“So it starts a process that becomes accelerated in that person … (smoking) casts a long shadow.”
A coalition of health and child welfare organisations says the study showed why government needed to speed up smoke-free reforms.
“This is more evidence pointing to the need for all public areas frequented by children including dining areas, playgrounds, public pools, beaches and sports fields, to be made smoke-free by law,” Protecting Children from Tobacco spokesman Stafford Sanders said.
“And for any governments that have not yet made cars carrying children smoke-free to do so quickly.”
The study “Environmental tobacco smoke and cardiometabolic risk in young children” was published in the European Heart Journal.
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