Effects of Tobacco Smoke on Biological Systems

This article was a review, not a new study. The author set out to assess how cigarette smoke affects biological systems ranging from isolated enzymes to different cell systems. The aim was to find dose-response information that could help predict the risks of environmental tobacco smoke. The review described the chemical makeup of tobacco and smoke, including gases, nicotine, polycyclic hydrocarbons and metals. It then summarized published animal, cell and human studies, touching briefly on fetal effects, which the author called outside the review's scope. The author noted that few studies of sidestream smoke in people had measured dose. Asbestos appeared only in passing, in an introductory reference to an earlier paper by Selikoff and colleagues (1968) on asbestos and smoking. The author concluded that much evidence showed adverse effects of smoke on cells, lung cells and blood. However, the fragmentary data could not show which effects occur at environmental tobacco smoke concentrations, and no dependable ranking of effects had been established. The author called for studies of low doses, such as 1-2 cigarettes per day.

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

From J-M's medical library

This copy comes from the Johns-Manville medical library. It was among the papers J-M kept in its medical library without an index entry.

We publish pages from a book for research and commentary: it shows what the medical literature in a leading asbestos company's own library said on the subject, and when. Our summary above is our own reading of it. The copyright stays with the publisher.