CLINICAL CHALLENGE Patients are not always forthcoming about their tobacco use. Smoking and other forms of tobacco use have serious health consequences, and many dermatologic diseases and treatments are negatively affected by tobacco exposure. When a patient does not disclose their full tobacco history, the dermatologist can miss a valuable opportunity to counsel the patient on tobacco cessatio...

The principal locomotory appendages of larval Manduca sexta, the prolegs, bear at their tips an array of mechanosensory hairs (the planta hairs). Each of the single sensory neurones associated with a planta hair sends an axon into the ganglion of the same segment where the afferent terminals make synaptic contact with interneurones and motoneurones. Electrical stimulation of a single afferent e...

We present a theoretical framework for assessment of exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS), and review current methods in order to provide guidelines for different types of studies. Exposure assessment should include both a quantitative dimension and consideration of time-specificity of exposure. The ultimate aim is to measure the concentrations of ETS encountered by an individual for d...

BACKGROUND Because they have chronic airway inflammation, adults with asthma could have symptomatic exacerbation after exposure to second hand smoke (SHS). Surprisingly, data on the effects of SHS exposure in adults with asthma are quite limited. Most previous epidemiological studies used self-reported SHS exposure which could be biased by inaccurate reporting. In a prospective cohort study of ...

INTRODUCTION Accurate estimation of exposure to Secondhand Smoke (SHS) is important in both research and clinical practice. We aimed to develop, an easy to implement, biomarker validated scale to provide an estimation of adult exposure to SHS for use within primary health care or epidemiological research. METHODS A pool of 26 baseline questions evaluating exposure to SHS was administered to 178...

We assessed the effects of prenatal exposure to environmental tobacco smoke on fetal growth and length of gestation. The study population consisted of 389 nonsmoking women who were selected from a population-based study in southeast Finland on the basis of questionnaire information after delivery (response rate 94%). The final exposure assessment was based on nicotine concentration of maternal ...

THE OBJECTIVES OF THIS STUDY WERE TO (i) to develop questionnaires that can identify never-smoking children and adults experiencing increased exposure to secondhand smoke (SHS+), (ii) to determine their validity against hair nicotine, and (iii) assess their reliability. A sample of 191 children (85 males; 106 females; 7-18 years) and 95 adult (23 males; 72 females; 18-62 years) never-smokers co...

BACKGROUND Smoking paradoxically increases the risk of small-for-gestational-age (SGA) birth but protects against preeclampsia. Some studies have reported a "U-shaped" distribution of fetal growth in preeclamptic pregnancies, but reasons for this are unknown. We investigated whether cigarette smoking interacts with preeclampsia to affect fetal growth, and compared levels of soluble fms-like tyr...

Nicotine underlies tobacco addiction, influences tobacco use patterns, and is used as a pharmacological aid to smoking cessation. The absorption, distribution and disposition characteristics of nicotine from tobacco and medicinal products are reviewed. Nicotine is metabolized primarily by the liver enzymes CYP2A6, UDPglucuronosyltransferase (UGT), and flavin-containing monooxygenase (FMO). In a...