rbystrianyk

http://www.healthsentinel.com/news.p...st_item&id=295

"Even One Puff of Smoke Damages DNA, Study Finds", Reuters, October 1,
2004,
Link: http://olympics.reuters.com/newsArti...toryID=6392040

Just one puff of a cigarette could damage a smoker's DNA, the first
step to cancer and heart disease, researchers said on Friday.

It obviously takes more than that to cause disease, but the team at
the University of Pittsburgh were surprised at how little smoke it
took to do the initial damage.

William Saunders and colleagues studied the effects of real cigarette
smoke on human fibroblasts, common cells found in the connective
tissue that holds much of the body together.

They exposed batches of growing cells to liquefied cigarette smoke and
saw the chromosomes that carry the DNA were pulled apart from both
ends.

"Double-stranded breaks are considered the most mutagenic type of DNA
damage because the broken ends can fuse to other chromosomes in the
cell," Saunders said in a statement.

This happened with very small amounts of smoke, Saunders said in a
statement prepared ahead of a weekend meeting of the Environmental
Mutagen Society in Pittsburgh.

Cigarette smoking is known to cause lung cancer and is also linked to
bladder, larynx and esophageal cancers, as well as heart disease.

"Unfortunately, no amount of scientific evidence arguing against
smoking will get everyone to stop or not begin to smoke in the first
place. So, perhaps one long-term goal should be to develop cigarettes
that somehow prevent what we've seen happen to the cells in our lab,"
Saunders said.