Study Finds New Secondhand Smoke Risk

Researchers at Children’s Hospital in Boston have identified another reason for people not to smoke cigarettes around young children: It can lower their levels of “good” cholesterol by about 10 percent.

Although secondhand smoke is considered bad for all people, the study, by Dr. Ellis J. Neufeld and colleagues, indicates that it is a special problem for 1 to 2 percent of children who have a total cholesterol count of more than 200, and whose close relatives have a history of developing heart disease before age 60.

Such children are at particularly high risk of suffering heart attacks or heart disease as young or middle-aged adults. Therefore, losing high-density lipoproteins, the so-called good cholesterol, is particularly dangerous to them.

Unlike artery-clogging low-density lipoproteins, HDL can reduce the risk of heart disease in people of all ages.

“This is one of the easiest possible health benefits to achieve: Get kids out of cigarette smoke,” Neufeld said Tuesday.

His study, published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, evaluated 103 children with high cholesterol or a family history of early heart disease.

Even after accounting for the children’s eating and exercise habits, age, weight and sex, Neufeld found that the children from households in which at least one person smoked had on average 10 percent lower levels of HDL cholesterol.

Neufeld said the study sample was too small to determine the rate at which a given exposure to cigarette smoke reduces good-cholesterol counts.

Several studies have shown that exposure to cigarette smoke causes HDL cholesterol levels to drop, but a biological explanation is not known.