Is it true that passive smoking is more harmful than active smoking?

It is believed that inhaling tobacco smoke has a more detrimental effect on health than smoking itself. We decided to check whether this is actually true from a scientific point of view.

Information about the greater harm of passive smoking can be found in a wide variety of sources - on websites institutions health and organs authorities, V Media, on the forums about motherhood and on entertaining portals. Explain this is, for example, like this: “When smoking, smoke enters the body partially filtered, and this happens in portions. A passive smoker constantly and fully inhales harmful substances contained in tobacco smoke.” 

Active (primary) smoking called the process of inhaling smoke from burning plant material. Passive (second-hand) smoking is the process of inhaling tobacco smoke along with the air by people who are near a person who smokes, but do not smoke themselves.

WITH recent since then scientists Also allocate tertiary smoking is the frequent and prolonged presence of non-smokers in a ventilated room in which no one smokes now, but previously they smoked a lot. This also includes the practice of using things that have been in a smoky room for a long time. Tertiary smoking also occurs when particulate smoke particles settle on clothing, skin and hair and are carried into areas where no smoking has ever occurred. For example, traces of tertiary smoking discovered in intensive care wards for newborns, who, of course, never smoked themselves and no one had smoked in this room before. However, after visits to infants by smoking relatives, particulate smoke particles were found on the surface of incubators and other furniture, and cotinine, one of the metabolites of nicotine, was present in the urine of newborns. 

By definition According to the American Cancer Society, a burning cigarette produces two types of smoke: main and side smoke. The main smoke is the one that the smoker himself inhales, that is, the flow going through the filter into the lungs. Side smoke occurs at the opposite end of the cigarette - from its burning part. The content of nicotine and various carcinogens in side smoke is two to six times higherthan basically. Moreover, the content of these substances in the smoke that “hung” in the air for 30 minutes higherthan in freshly produced. Scientists from San Francisco exposed rats to fresh and “real” smoke and found that “real” smoke was two to four times more toxic to the tissues of the rats’ respiratory tract than fresh smoke. In the same work, scientists noted that fresh sidestream smoke, in turn, turned out to be three to four times more toxic to laboratory animals than the main smoke, which is inhaled by a smoker. 

Transferring the experimental data to reality, we can formulate them as follows: being in a room where someone smoked 30 minutes before is even more dangerous than standing next to a smoking person, while the side smoke itself contains more harmful substances than the main one. From this, it would seem, one can immediately conclude that passive smoking is definitely more dangerous than active smoking. However, there are a number of factors that were not previously taken into account. Smoker's main smoke inhaled not constantly, but only at the moment of puffing, so the consumption of the main smoke by each individual will depend on smoking behavior. At the same time, the smoker is also not protected from the more toxic side smoke that enters the air from the smoldering end of the cigarette. 

If we compare the risks of major diseases arising from tobacco smoke, we get the following picture.

• Cardiovascular disease: risk in active smokers versus non-smokers (i.e. those who neither actively nor passively smoke on a regular basis) higher two to four times the risk in passive smokers versus non-smokers higher by 25–30%.
• Stroke: risk in active smokers versus non-smokers higher, By different According to data, the risk is two to six times higher for passive smokers versus non-smokers higher by 25–30%.
• Lung cancer: risk in active smokers versus non-smokers higher 15–30 times, risk in passive smokers versus non-smokers higher by 20–30%.
• Memory problems: experiment demonstrated that smokers perform 30% worse on memory tests compared to non-smokers, while passive smokers suffer slightly less - their results are 20% worse than non-smokers.

It turns out that, although the side smoke itself, which passive smokers inhale, contains a higher concentration of harmful substances than the main smoke passing through the cigarette filter into the lungs, the harm it causes to various organs and functions is still less. However, secondhand smoke is extremely dangerous and should be avoided at all costs.

Cover image: Maxpixel

Not true

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