SAN FRANCISCO, March 22 (UPI) -- Children with asthma face serious harm if adults smoke cigarettes in the home, U.S. allergy and asthma specialists said.
New studies indicate if parents smoke in the house, it wipes out the benefit of drugs that can protect children against the deadly lung disease. Moreover, the specialists said, efforts to get moms and dads to quit smoking for the benefit of their kids are not having much of an impact.
"We need stronger persuasive measures to get parents to understand how important it is to stop smoking in their homes if they have children with asthma," said Dr. Robert Holzhauer, clinical assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Rochester School of Medicine in New York.
Holzhauer and other specialists stopped short, however, of advocating legislation to make smoking in the homes of children with asthma equivalent to child abuse.
"I think that if we were to report these parents to the authorities for child abuse, we would lose the children as patients," he told reporters during a news briefing Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology.
"The data are clearly there," he told United Press International. "We have unequivocal data to show that sidestream smoke is dangerous to people with asthma."
In a study, Holzhauer and colleagues found children between ages 3 and 7 who have mild and persistent asthma and who receive in-school treatment with inhaled corticosteroids -- a proven, effective way to prevent asthma attacks -- have superior quality of life compared with children who do not receive the treatment in school. The treated children have fewer attacks and fewer absences, and their parents also enjoy an improved quality of life.
The researchers also found, however, if smoking occurs in the home, those advantages were wiped out -- almost making the treatment ineffective.
In another study, Dr. Dennis Ownby, chief of allergy and immunology at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, looked at children raised in households where pets were present at birth.
New research has suggested the presence of pets offers some protection against allergies, but Ownby said his recent research has found if one or both parents smoke in the home, their children lose that protective effect.
"Early exposure to tobacco smoke negates much of the allergy protection that living with pets affords," he said. "This research shows that cigarette smoking is not innocuous to young children. We see evidence that it's affecting their immune system. We know that if both parents smoke, their children are absorbing chemicals from that smoke."
Urine tests can detect the presence of smoking-related chemicals, notably cotinine, a by-product of nicotine.
Efforts to reduce cigarette smoking appear to be working in Manitoba, Canada, reported Dr. Joel Liem, a fellow in training at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg -- but not because there are children at risk in the household.
From 1995 to 2002, smoking rates in Manitoba households where babies were born fell from 32 percent to 23 percent --similar to reductions in smoking observed across Canada during the same period.
When analyzing a wide-ranging questionnaire that masked the central theme of asthma and smoking, Liem said, "We found that a child's diagnosis of asthma did not play a role in changing parents smoking behavior."
He added smokers also did not alter their behavior for other reasons, such as a family history of asthma, place of residence or socioeconomic status.
"We thought it was great that the rates of smoking are dropping but we were not finding that it was falling at any greater rate in the homes where children have asthma," Liem said.
Rather than attacking the problem with Draconian legislation, Dr. Kathleen Sheerin, a private practice allergy specialist in Atlanta, suggested educating parents about asthma and its effects on children would be a better course of action.
"We are trying to get the message out. We counsel parents to go to another room to smoke or to go outside if there is a child in the house," Sheerin, chair of AAAAI's public education committee, told UPI.
While those efforts continue, Holzhauer added, "We still have a long way to go."
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Ed Susman covers medical research for UPI Science News. E-mail [email protected]
