Smoking
Emergency rooms in communities with indoor smoking bans reported a 17 percent decrease in the number of children needing care for asthma attacks, according to new research from the University of Chicago Medicine.
"Young children have little control over their exposure to household tobacco smoke, which is considered toxic to the brain at a time when its development is exponential."
Occasional smokers could avoid some of the harmful effects, according to a new report in The American Journal of Medicine.
Helping scientists to better understand lung diseases.
Smoking reduced the life expectancy of people with HIV, who take medications, by about twice as much as HIV itself.
"This study of smoking tells us that looking in the DNA of cancers can provide provocative new clues to how cancers develop and thus, potentially, how they can be prevented."
Researchers created an airway-on-a-chip that supports living cells from normal or diseased human lungs, and an instrument that "breathes" cigarette smoke in and out over these chips.
A recent study led by University of Kentucky researchers illuminates a new way that tobacco smoke may promote the development of lung cancer: inhibiting a DNA repair process called nucleotide excision repair (NER).