Rose Marie Robertson, M.D., FAHA, American Heart Association Deputy Chief Science and Medical Officer.

Offering perspective on AHA Scientific Sessions 2020 Presentation P1917 
copyright American Heart Association 2020

"I think this is a very important study. The power of this study comes from the fact that they were able to follow, over a 34-35 year period, more than 1,100 people from childhood to age 45 and assess just how much secondhand smoke they were exposed to. And they were able to do this in quite a granular manner. They were able to count the number of individuals smoking in the home for children, how many years they were exposed to secondhand smoke in the home. And then the severity were they exposed to, you know, over many hours in the home, was there a lot of smoking in the house, or were the smokers not smoking in the house, or were they smoking in the house sometimes? So that the granularity of the data allows them to really dissect out the importance of those. And it turns out that all of those issues were important. The more smokers they were exposed to, the more years they were exposed in the home and the extent to which they were exposed, all led each one independently to changes in cardiovascular function."