United States: Teenagers might be deceived to believe that smoking gives them a cool outlook in their teenage hood, only for their breath to be stolen in adulthood, a new study suggests.
What more did the study suggest?
Children smokers of age 15 or less also are at a 27 percent higher risk of contracting COPD when they grow up than those who started smoking later.
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a lung disease that leads to impaired breathing and has other symptoms that will be described in this content. At present, there is no complete treatment, and the symptoms aggravate continually as the years pass by.
According to Dr. Laura Paulin, senior researcher and a pulmonologist at Dartmouth Health’s Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, “Our study suggests that a person with a childhood smoking history has an increased risk of developing COPD, regardless of current smoking status, smoking duration, cigarette pack-years and exposure to secondhand smoke,” US News reported.
Prior studies have established that COPD is prevalent in individuals who began smoking before the age of fifteen, the researchers noted in background information.
What more has the study suggested?
The new study was meant to establish whether childhood smoking contributes to COPD in the later years of life, irrespective of the amount of smoking that a person has done and second-hand smoking exposure.
From smokers for the research, scientists assess consistent data from over 10,100 individuals in a government-ongoing survey focusing on the health impact of smoking, known as the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health study.
When restricted to ever-smokers, ever-smokers starting smoking younger than 15 years had a 29 percent prevalence of COPD, while ever-smokers starting smoking at or after the age of 15 years had a 21 percent prevalence of this disease, and never-smokers had less than 8 percent.
The current smokers were even more likely to be children, had begun smoking earlier, and were more exposed to secondhand smoke.
However, even after controlling for those factors, childhood smokers remained more likely to develop COPD than those who started smoking later in life, data have suggested.
As per Paulin, “Critical lung development occurs in childhood and early adolescence, making children’s lungs particularly susceptible to damage caused by cigarette smoking,” US News reported.
“These findings highlight the need for additional public health efforts to reduce, and ultimately prevent, childhood smoking,” he continued.