Is Passive Smoking Exposure in Early Life a Risk Factor for Future Cardiovascular Disease?

Thanks to the foresight of researchers in the 1970s and 1980s in establishing large cohorts of children to investigate the origins of cardiovascular disease (CVD), we now have the ability to understand the impact childhood smoking exposure, among other pediatric exposures, has on later-life cardiovascular (CV) health. The age of the participants in these large prospective cohorts is still prohibitive in that researchers can only consider pre-clinical markers of CV pathology. Despite this, cohorts from multiple countries have reported consistent findings concerning the adverse CV impact childhood passive smoking exposure is having decades later. Fortunately, we now have sufficient evidence as to the exact mechanisms through which tobacco smoke causes CVD. With a large proportion of the world’s children exposed to passive smoking daily, especially in the as-yet unstudied developing world, but with very few living in jurisdictions with effective and enforced protective legislation, the time for public health action is now.