Vitamin D May Protect Against Lung Function Impairment And Decline In Smokers
“We examined the relationship between vitamin D deficiency, smoking, lung function, and the rate of lung function decline over a 20 year period in a cohort of 626 adult white men from the Normative Aging Study,” said lead author Nancy E. Lange, MD, MPH, of the Channing Laboratory, Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “We found that vitamin D sufficiency (defined as serum vitamin D levels of >20 ng/ml) had a protective effect on lung function and the rate of lung function decline in smokers.”
The findings were published online ahead of print publication in the American Thoracic Society’s American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.
In the study, vitamin D levels were assessed at three different time points between 1984 and 2003, and lung function was assessed concurrently with spirometry.
In vitamin D deficient subjects, for each one unit increase in pack-years of smoking, mean forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1) was 12 ml lower, compared with a mean reduction of 6.5 ml among subjects who were not vitamin D deficient. In longitudinal models, vitamin D deficiency exacerbated the effect of pack years of smoking on the decline in FEV1 over time.
No significant effect of vitamin D levels on lung function or lung function decline were observed in the overall study cohort, which included both smokers and non-smokers.
“Our results suggest that vitamin D might modify the damaging effects of smoking on lung function,” said Dr. Lange. “These effects might be due to vitamin D’s anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant properties.”
The study has some limitations, including that the data is observational only and not a trial, that vitamin D levels fluctuate over time, and that the study has limited generalizability due to the cohort being all elderly men.
“If these results can be replicated in other studies, they could be of great public health importance,” said Dr. Lange. “Future research should also examine whether vitamin D protects against lung damage from other sources, such as air pollution.”
“While these results are intriguing, the health hazards associated with smoking far outweigh any protective effect that vitamin D may have on lung function ,” said Alexander C. White MS, MD, chair of the American Thoracic Society’s Tobacco Action Committee. “First and foremost, patients who smoke should be fully informed about the health consequences of smoking and in addition be given all possible assistance to help them quit smoking.”
Contacts and sources:
American Thoracic Society
About the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine:
With an impact factor of 11.080, the AJRRCM is a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Thoracic Society. It aims to publish the most innovative science and the highest quality reviews, practice guidelines and statements in the pulmonary, critical care and sleep-related fields.
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Whistler Blowers, Insiders
Nov. 17, 2009 (Orlando, Fla.) — For years, doctors have blamed fast food, lack of exercise, smoking, and other detrimental lifestyle factors of modern life for our predisposition to heart disease.
But now, hardening of the arteries, or atherosclerosis, has been detected in 3,500-year-old mummies, challenging that view.
Atherosclerosis in ancient Egyptians was first identified in 1852 when physiologist Johann Nepomuk Czermak found calcific aortic atherosclerosis during the autopsy of a mummy belonging to an elderly Egyptian woman.
Other autopsies found histologic evidence of atherosclerosis in the aorta as well as in other large arteries on several 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummies.
However, the Horus study is the largest, non-invasive investigation on this disease. Spanning over two millennia, it detected evidence of atherosclerosis in almost all the dynastic eras of ancient Egypt, and highlighted differences in the mummies’ socioeconomical status.
“Our findings lend support to previous work in the UK and the Netherlands, confirming that the present drug classification systems have little relation to the evidence of harm,” said the report. “They also accord with the conclusions of previous expert reports that aggressively targeting alcohol harms is a valid and necessary public health strategy.”
When released, the authors’ findings ran afoul of the government’s long-standing drug classification system, which have claimed for years that other drugs are more potent.
“Overall, alcohol is the most harmful drug because it’s so widely used,” Nutt told the BBC following publication of his findings.
“Crack cocaine is more addictive than alcohol but because alcohol is so widely used there are hundreds of thousands of people who crave alcohol every day, and those people will go to extraordinary lengths to get it,” he said.
Predictably, like its American counterpart likely would, the British government balked at Nutt’s report.
“Our priorities are clear – we want to reduce drug use, crack down on drug-related crime and disorder and help addicts come off drugs for good,” a spokesman from the Home Office sniffed.
The alcohol lobby obviously has deeper pockets.