Eva Mendes Elle Russia January 2010

American actress Eva Mendes opened the cover page of fashion magazine Elle Russia for the month of January 2010. Eva Mendes was one of the best dressed and sexiest women of 2009. She told how she keeps fit. She said that before each film was subjected to a diet devoid of any type of sugar.

The adverse health effects of cigarette smoking are serious and, in many cases, deadly. Each year, more than 400,000 Americans die from tobacco use—more than from alcohol, suicide, AIDS, homicide, car accidents and illegal drugs combined. But not all of the health problems related to smoking result in deaths. Millions of people suffer from at least one chronic disease due to current or former smoking. Furthermore, the smoke from cigarettes has a harmful health effect on those around the smoke, especially children because their bodies are developing.According to the Surgeon General, secondhand smoke exposure causes acute lower respiratory infections such as bronchitis and pneumonia in infants and young children and respiratory symptoms including cough, phlegm, wheeze, and breathlessness among school-aged children. Exposure to secondhand smoke also causes children who already have asthma to experience more frequent and severe attacks. And a new study shows that children who are exposed to tobacco smoke face early emphysema in adulthood—a finding that suggests early-life exposures to tobacco smoke (ETS) causes permanent damage to children’s lungs.

The study, conducted by researchers from the Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, used computed tomography (CT) scans to examine lung changes in 1,781 healthy non-smoking adults from six communities in the United States. About half of the participants had at least one regular smoker in their household during childhood. Those reporting childhood exposure to tobacco smoke were average age 61, primarily non-Hispanic white, and less likely to have been born outside the United States. An analysis of the scans showed that, compared to participants who did not live with regular smokers during childhood, those who were exposed to ETS had more emphysema-like lung changes. The changes were worse for adults whose households had two smokers, compared to one, compared to no one in the home who smoked. Those exposed to ETS were also at an increased risk of developing childhood asthma.

“We were able to detect a difference on CT scans between the lungs of participants who lived with a smoker as a child and those who did not,” said Dr. Gina Lovasi, assistant professor of epidemiology at Mailman. “Some known harmful effects of tobacco smoke are short term, and this new research suggests that effects of tobacco smoke on the lungs may also persist for decades.”

None of the information in the study could determine if lung damage occurs during pregnancy from expectant mothers who smoke, but the researchers said “the association between childhood ETS and early emphysema among participants whose mothers did not smoke suggests that the effect we are detecting is for smoke exposure in the home during childhood rather than in utero exposure alone.”