Animal Smoking Experiments
Scientists like to joke
that smoking is a leading cause of statistics. It's an amusing observation,
but sadly, when it comes to animal experimentation, it’s all
too true. Despite the failure of numerous animal studies during
the 1950s and 1960s to reveal a clear link between cigarette smoking
and cancer—and despite our established knowledge from human
clinical data that smoking is deadly—smoking experiments on
animals continue.
A search of the NIH PubMed database reveals dozens of rat and mouse
smoking studies published in 2004 alone. Here’s a brief sampling:
- At the University of California, Davis, male mice spent five
months in a whole-body inhalation chamber to assess three levels
of smoke exposure on lung tumors (Witschi et al. 2004).
- At the Institute of Biological Research and Technology in Athens,
Greece, a tobacco smoke carcinogen was forced into rats’
lungs through a tube or by abdominal injection over a 16-week
period to explore the interaction between tobacco smoke and asbestos
exposure (Loli et al. 2004).
- At Creighton University in Nebraska, rats were exposed to smoke
for 12 weeks to observe its effects on their nasal linings (Vent
et al. 2004).
- At Slovak Medical University, Slovak Republic, rats were made
to inhale fibrous industrial dusts combined with cigarette smoke
for six months to see what it did to their lung cells (Cerna et
al. 2004).
- A study of 65 rats at Adnan Menderes University in Turkey concluded
that exposure to passive cigarette smoke may stunt kidney growth
(Dundar et al. 2004).
At least one tobacco company—R.J. Reynolds of Winston-Salem,
North Carolina—also continues to tinker away on animal experiments:
- Male and female rats were forced to inhale cigarette smoke
five hours per week for 13 weeks to compare two different reference
cigarettes (Higuchi et al. 2004).
- Cigarette tar was applied to the skin of female mice (40 per
group) over a 29-week period to evaluate a specific test assay,
variations of which have been used for decades (Meckley et al.
2004).
- A 13-week smoke inhalation study in rats and a 30-week skin
tumor study in mice concluded that cigarettes with or without
expanded shredded tobacco stems had similar toxicity (Theophilus
et al. 2004).
Many of these experiments appear to be useless attempts to confirm
what is already known in humans. Future columns will investigate
this possibility and the wealth of available approaches based on
clinically relevant human data.
References
Cerna S, Beno M, Hurbankova M, Kovacikova Z, Bobek P, Kyrtopoulos
SA. Evaluation of bronchoalveolar lavage fluid cytotoxic parameters
after inhalation exposure to amosite and wollastonite fibrous dusts
combined with cigarette smoke. Cent Eur J Public Health 2004;12
Suppl:S20-3.
Dundar M, Kocak I, Culhaci N. Effects of long-term passive
smoking on the diameter of glomeruli in rats: Histopathological
evaluation. Nephrology (Carlton) 2004;9:53-7.
Higuchi MA, Sagartz J, Shreve WK, Ayres PH. Comparative
subchronic inhalation study of smoke from the 1R4F and 2R4F reference
cigarettes. Inhal Toxicol 2004;16:1-20.
Loli P, Topinka J, Georgiadis P, Dusinska M, Hurbankova
M, Kovacikova Z, Volkovova K, Wolff T, Oesterle D, Kyrtopoulos SA.
Benzo[a]pyrene-enhanced mutagenesis by asbestos in the lung of lambda-lacI
transgenic rats. Mutat Res 2004;553:79-90.
Meckley D, Hayes JR, Van Kampen KR, Mosberg AT, Swauger
JE. A responsive, sensitive, and reproducible dermal tumor promotion
assay for the comparative evaluation of cigarette smoke condensates.
Regul Toxicol Pharmacol 2004;39:135-49.
Theophilus EH, Pence DH, Meckley DR, Higuchi MA, Bombick
BR, Borgerding MF, Ayres PH, Swauger JE. Toxicological evaluation
of expanded shredded tobacco stems. Food Chem Toxicol 2004;42:631-9.
Vent J, Robinson AM, Gentry-Nielsen MJ, Conley DB, Hallworth
R, Leopold DA, Kern RC. Pathology of the olfactory epithelium: smoking
and ethanol exposure. Laryngoscope 2004;114:1383-8.
Witschi H, Espiritu I, Uyeminami D, Suffia M, Pinkerton
KE. Lung tumor response in strain a mice exposed to tobacco smoke:
some dose-effect relationships. Inhal Toxicol. 2004;16:27-32.
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