Parents who smoke may be significantly increasing the risk of their children developing rheumatoid arthritis as adults, by as much as….
Parental smoking has been identified as an important risk factor in the development of rheumatoid arthritis. According to a new study, children from parents who smoke have a 75% higher risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis as adults.
The study was led by Dr Kazuki Yoshida, an Associate Epidemiologist and Instructor in Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, in the USA.
In the study, researchers analysed clinical data from 90,923 participants in the Nurses’ Health Study II, which included female registered nurses aged 25–42 years in 1989. Among these participants, researchers found that 532 nurses developed rheumatoid arthritis at a around 28 years of age.
Further analyses on the life history of these participants revealed that parental smoking when they were children was associated with a 75% higher risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis.
“We used advanced statistical methods that allowed us to decipher the potential direct harm of early-life passive smoking experience on rheumatoid arthritis risk, while also taking into account factors occurring throughout adulthood,” Dr Yoshida said in a press release.
The increased risk detected was independent of other known risk factors, such as personal smoking when the participants were adults. In these cases, researechers detected an even higher risk of rheumatoid arthritis.
“These results suggest that early life inhalant exposures such as passive smoking may pre-dispose individuals to develop rheumatoid arthritis later in life,” said Dr Jeffrey A. Sparks, also from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and senior author of the study.