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Protecting Kids from Secondhand Smoke at Home May Reduce Breathing Problems from Colds

Published: November 15, 2001

Protecting children from secondhand smoke may reduce breathing problems associated with colds, a new study published by the American Lung Association suggests.

Parents who don't smoke at home may also reduce the risk that their child will end up in the emergency room with an attack of wheezing, the researchers found.

The results add to the growing body of evidence linking secondhand smoke at home with increased breathing problems in school-aged children, the researchers say.

The study appears in the January issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, published by the American Lung Association.

The study of 11,534 elementary school children throughout the United States and Canada found that kids currently exposed to secondhand smoke at home were 70 percent more likely to have wheezing with colds, 60 percent more likely to go to the emergency room for wheezing, and 40 percent more likely to have persistent wheezing compared with kids in homes without secondhand smoke. The results suggest that more than 20 percent of both wheezing with colds and hospital emergency room visits for wheeze among children in the study group may have been due to current exposure to secondhand smoke in the home, the authors concluded.

"This study suggests that children may be at risk of having more severe respiratory infections if they're exposed to secondhand smoke in the home," said George T. O'Connor, M.D., assistant professor of medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine, an author of the study.

"We found a dose-response relationship in the study -- that is, the more cigarettes smoked in the home, the higher the rates of wheezing in children," said Douglas W. Dockery, Ph.D. of the Harvard School of Public Health, another study author.

More than two-thirds of the children in the study (68.5 percent) were reported to have been exposed to secondhand smoke at home at some time in their lives, and half were exposed to it at home at the time of the study. One-quarter of the children were exposed to two or more smokers at home, and 13 percent of children lived in homes where it was estimated that more than 30 cigarettes were smoked every day.