The evidence continues to mount that secondhand smoke is a dangerous health risk. Recent research uncovered a link in adults between secondhand smoke and elevated markers of inflammation such as C-reactive protein (CRP), which is a known risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Researchers from the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health and the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the Miller School of Medicine have now discovered the same elevation in children, and their findings were published in the February issue of Nicotine & Tobacco Research.

James Wilkinson, M.D., M.P.H., David Lee, Ph.D., and Kristopher Arheart, Ed.D., used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to study the association between secondhand tobacco exposure, estimated by serum cotinine levels, and levels of CRP in children. Cotinine is a metabolite of nicotine, and it represents short-term exposure to secondhand cigarette smoke in a non-smoker.

“Children who had high cotinine levels also had higher C-reactive protein levels, and as their cotinine levels went up, so did their C-reactive protein levels,” says Wilkinson, associate professor of epidemiology and pediatrics and lead author of the study. “Our concern is that these kids will be exposed for many more decades than adults would be, so hopefully this will spur more research into this area.”

The collection of the original survey data was conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics and used a complex sampling strategy to obtain a representative sample of the U.S. civilian population, age two months or older.