Toward a Less Harmful Cigarette (1968)

This article does not concern asbestos. It is a shortened version of an animal experiment on cigarette smoke and the airways of dogs. The authors gave tracheostomies to 10 beagles. The dogs smoked through a specially designed tube every morning and afternoon, building up to a maximum of 12 cigarettes per day per dog. Ten other dogs served as nonsmoking controls. Five smoking dogs died during the experiment, four of them with blood clots and pulmonary infarction (dead lung tissue). The other five were killed after 421 days of smoking. The authors then examined the airways under the microscope. Gland overgrowth with swollen mucus cells was not found in any section from the control dogs. It was found in 96.7% of sections from smoking dog 29 and in 98.9-100% of sections from the other smoking dogs. Every section from the smoking dogs showed an altered airway lining: either extra cell rows beneath the ciliated cells, or three or more rows of cells with no ciliated cells. Cells with abnormal-looking nuclei appeared more often as the dogs' smoking increased. The authors stated that longer exposure to cigarette smoke brings greater airway-lining changes.

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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.