Cigarette Smoke Affects Hundreds of Genes
Doctors have observed long time ago a correlation between smoking and cases of cancers found in many organs besides lungs and trochee, such as kidney, colon and bladder cancers.
In a recent study was revealed that lighting up a cigarette affects a human’s gene activity in the whole body. The received data could be the answer to why smoking affects overall body state, starting from heart diseases and various infections. A study team from Australia and San Antonio, Texas, analyzed white blood cell samples of more than 1200 people, ages 16-94, who took part in the San Antonio Family Heart Study.
The researches found out that those 297 smokers in the group are more likely to develop uncommon features of gene activity that may be connected with inflammation, tumor development, cell death and more.
According to the research director the cigarette smoke may raise or reduce the power of 323 genes activity. “We were amazed by the high influence that cigarette smoke had on gene activity, especially taking into account that we used a ordinary measure of smoke exposure: smoker or non-smoker”, stated research director Jac Charlesworth, a scientific officer at the Menzies Research Institute Tasmania in Australia.
Doctors have known long since that smoking aggravates cases of cancer, weakens immune system and is the reason of many health problems. Heart diseases, slow wound repair and other diseases are more frequently encountered among smoking people, according to the National Institutes of Health and the recent study.
“Probably the most important thing the given research realized is that it went further in understanding the biological reactions the body has to smoking. Now we clearly see that the part of the activity is the result of changes that occur at the gene level”, stated Charlesworth.
Cigarette smoke comprises more than 4000 chemical substances, as for example toxins and carcinogens. When someone is smoking the smoke toxins penetrate into the blood flow through the lungs and are spread throughout the body. As the activity of a single gene can affect the activity of a number of other genes, the research couldn’t clarify which chemical substance in cigarette smoke was responsible for affecting a particular gene.
“We found out than not only a particular gene but the whole compounds of gene are affected by the cigarettes smoking”, the researcher said.
Charlesworth recognized that the aim of their study was limited, as they had the possibility to analyze only the samples of Mexican-American families. Smoking can have the similar effect on other ethnic groups, but they can’t prove it as they didn’t participated at the study.
Charlesworth declared that her team is gathering new data for one more study on the same subject, using the samples collected within 15 years.
“It would be possible to find out whether any of these gene activities remain in individuals who stop smoking, or they are reversible,” she said.
