Chest
Volume 69, Issue 1, January 1976, Pages 48-50
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Clinical Investigatlons
Respiratory Symptoms Related to Smoking Habits of Family Adults

https://doi.org/10.1378/chest.69.1.48Get rights and content

A study of the effects of family smoking habits on the symptoms of other family members has shown that symptoms of household members, especially children, are related to smoking habits within the households but are not significantly so when symptoms in adults are controlled.

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Methods

The Tucson Epidemiological Study of Obstructive Lung Diseases is a longitudinal study of a stratified cluster random sample of Anglo-white households in the community. Methods of study have been described in detail elsewhere4 The final sample consisted of 3,484 Anglo-white individuals from a total 1,655 households. Each individual within the household completed a self-administered questionnaire, which contained information on demographic characteristics, medical history, respiratory history,

Results

Children in households with present smokers have higher overall rates of persistent cough, persistent phlegm, wheezing on most days, and physician-confirmed “asthma, bronchial trouble, or emphysema” than those children in households with only ex-smokers or those who never smoked, as seen in Table 1. Although the trend exists for all of the conditions, only the trend for persistent cough was statistically significant. The results for all adult nonsmokers are also seen in Table 1. There was no

Discussion

The results from this study do not indicate the same significance of social status, family size, or specific age of children in relation to the effect of household smoking on children's symptoms that Colley1 found, but they do confirm that symptoms within the adults of the household definitely appear to influence the symptoms reported for the children.

This finding has far-reaching significant ramifications related to both the reporting of symptoms in children and factors which may be

References (4)

  • JRT Colley

    Respiratory symptoms in children and parental smoking and phlegm production

    Br Med J

    (1974)
  • WW Holland

    Respiratory symptoms and ventilatory function: A family study

    Br J Prev Soc Med

    (1969)
There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (0)

Supported by Specialized Center of Research grant HL 14136 from the National Heart and Lung Institute.

Manuscript received June 2; revision accepted July 31.

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