Is Smoking Good for Anything?

Robert W. Griffith, MD

In the same way one can say "no drug has no side effects" one can probably say "no toxin has no beneficial effect". Smoking has long been known to cause a huge number of ills - lung cancer, laryngeal cancer, bladder cancer, coronary heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, stroke, macular degeneration, thyroid disease . . .the list goes on. However, there are two conditions where smoking appears to have a beneficial effect.

Ucerative colitis is a distressing inflammatory bowel disease that affects the colon. Smoking appears to be associated with a lessened likelihood of developing ulcerative colitis. But it's associated with an increased risk of developing Crohn's disease, the other inflammatory bowel disease that affects the small intestine (its other name is regional ileitis). An apparent paradox.

In 2003 a meta-analysis reported that, c ompared with never having smoked, cigarette smoking reduced the risk of developing Parkinson's disease by roughly half. A new study, reported in the Archives of Neurology, was a more sophisticated analysis of pooled data from11 studies. It showed, conclusively, that there was a dose-dependent reduction of Parkinson's disease associated with cigarette smoking.

All this doesn't make it worthwhile for anyone to take up smoking. It merely ponints the wayto using such findings to investigate how diseases come about, and what can influence their occurrence. With luck it may lead to new, innovative medications.

Source
HealthandAge Blog

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