Passive smoke harms teen arteries
Pun Wai Han 6B
Passive smoke is that someone breathes in tabacco smoke. It contains cotinine, which is a by-product of nicotine.
A recent survey shows that the damage caused by second-hand tobacco smoke starts in childhood and causes measurable damage by the teen years. Many peaple know that passive smoke may be harmful for adult blood vessels. However this specific effect also happen among children and adolescents. Dr. Katariina Kallio of the University of Turku in Finland and her team conduct an experiment. They divided the children into groups with high, intermediate and low cotinine levels.
Then, after the experiment, ultrasound was used to measure the thickness of the children’s arteries. The children with the most cotinine in their blood were 7 per cent thicker than those with the lowest cotinine levels. The finding suggests that children should not face exposure to tobacco smoke at all as it may be do harm to the blood vessels.