By Browning Brooks
FSU Communications Group
The news that a Florida State University professor had new evidence of heart risks posed by second-hand smoke had state lawmakers asking him to testify this spring in support of a bill banning smoking in all Florida restaurants.
Professor Bob Moffatt of the FSU Department of Nutrition, Food and Movement Sciences told a House Health Care subcommittee that working in a smoke- clogged room damages blood vessels in non-smokers at about the same rate that smoking does. Following his testimony, the subcommittee narrowly approved the bill, but it was never heard in the full committee.
Moffatt's research revealed that non-smoking women working as waiters and bartenders -- and exposed to heavy tobacco smoke -- experience the same dangerous drops in "good cholesterol" and hikes in carbon monoxide levels as smokers.
"We know quite well that cigarette smoke dramatically influences heart
disease
risk," Moffatt told legislators. "We found, without any doubt, that the
exposure to tobacco smoke dramatically reduces the lipoproteins in these
individuals." Low levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol
have
been found to increase the risk of heart disease.
In the first study of its kind, Moffatt and other researchers at FSU and the Health Promotion Center at the University of Louisville recruited 28 non-smokers working at smoke-filled restaurants and bars in Tallahassee. The women had never smoked but had been subjected to concentrated doses of passive smoke at least six hours a day, four days a week, for the previous six months.
The subjects, ages 21 to 50, were matched as closely as possible with a group of women who'd never smoked and had been generally free from environmental smoke exposure to rule out other influences, such as exercise, on their blood lipoprotein levels.
A third matched group comprised of women who had smoked a minimum of 20 cigarettes a day for the previous five years, but who were not exposed to environmental tobacco smoke, served as a smoking control group.
"We were interested to know what effect passive smoke would have on HDL in non-smokers subjected to it regularly at work," Moffatt said.
"We found very clearly that HDL levels were decreased by 20 percent for the women exposed to environmental tobacco smoke as well as for the smokers when compared to the non-smokers."
HDLs transport cholesterol in the body and cleanse the arteries, so decreased levels of HDLs could increase the likelihood of hardening of the arteries.
The researchers found that carbon monoxide levels in the body also were affected substantially by tobacco smoke at the work site.
When they had been away from work for at least 12 hours, the non- smokers who worked in smoke had about the same amount of carbon monoxide in their bodies as the non-exposed non-smokers. But after only two hours back at work, they had a nearly 500-percent increase.
Translation: Lighting up is dangerous. But it may be just as dangerous to work around people who do.