Other people's cigarette smoke could be to blame for much of the chronic runny nose and sinus woes — also known as rhinosinusitis — that plague one in every six U.S. adults, new research shows.
"If you've had a history of chronic rhinosinusitis, or if you have sensitive nasal passages and sinuses and you're vulnerable, then definitely, absolutely you should avoid secondhand smoke," Dr. C. Martin Tammemagi of Brock University in St. Catherines, Ontario, who helped conduct the new study, told Reuters Health.
Tammemagi and his colleagues found that exposure to secondhand smoke — especially on the job and at private social functions like parties and weddings — upped the likelihood of suffering from chronic rhinosinusitis. In fact, they calculated that passive smoking is behind 40 percent of all cases of the condition.
Two studies have suggested a link between secondhand smoke and chronic rhinosinusitis, Tammemagi and his colleagues note in their report in the journal Archives of Otolaryngology — Head & Neck Surgery.
To investigate further, they looked at 306 non-smoking adults who developed the condition and 306 non-smoking, healthy "controls," surveying them about their exposure to secondhand smoke at home, work, public places, and at private social functions.
After taking socioeconomic status, air pollution, exposure to chemicals, and other relevant factors into account, Tammemagi and his colleagues found that exposure at work nearly tripled the risk of chronic rhinosinusitis, while exposure at private social functions more than doubled it.
While home and public exposure both also increased risk, the increase wasn't statistically significant, meaning it could have been due to chance. But the more places where a person was exposed to secondhand smoke, the greater their risk; it roughly doubled for each passive smoking venue.
Few researchers have looked at exposure to secondhand smoke in private social settings, Tammemagi noted, "possibly because you can't really legislate what people are going to do in the privacy of their own home."
He noted that he and his colleagues gathered data for the current study among patients treated at the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, at around the time measures to control secondhand smoke exposure were first introduced in the United States.
"People get the impression that government agencies and public health agencies are trying to suppress the public's exposure to secondhand smoke," the researcher added. "Our data indicate that more than half the people, 53 percent of the controls, had some exposure to secondhand smoke, and that was surprisingly high. I was suspecting or hoping that it would be less than that."
While progress is being made on exposure at home and at work, he added, public places and at private social events "still need some work."
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