Passive Smoking Linked to Arthritis Risk

French study linked air pollution and exposure to cigarettes smoke to rheumatoid arthritis (RA), an inflammatory autoimmune disease that causes pain, swelling and stiffness in the joints.

Diane Caruana

March 10, 2022

To date, active smoking has been the most reproducibly reported risk factor for a type of RA called anti-citrullinated protein antibody (ACPA). A team of French researchers set out to determine whether they could observe such a link between passive smoking and the risk of developing RA in a large sample of healthy French women.

The E3N-EPIC (Etude Epidémiologique au prèsdes femmes de la Mutuelle générale de l’Education Nationale) has collected data on healthy French women since 1990. For this particular study 79,806 women were included, amongst whom 698 suffered from RA. Amongst the whole group 10,810 (13.5%) were exposed to passive smoking as children, 42,807 (53.6%) to passive smoking as adults, 6,581 (8.25%) were exposed to both, and 47,036 (58.9%) were exposed to neither.

The compiled data indicated that passive smoking in childhood was positively associated with the risk of RA amongst women who had never smoked themselves, but not among those who had ever smoked.

Study links vaping to Leaky Gut Syndrome

Another study published earlier this year suggested that vaping, not smoking, may be linked to another type of inflammation, Leaky Gut Syndrome. Published in the journal iScience, the titled, “E-cigarettes compromise the gut barrier and trigger inflammation,” alleged that chemicals found in e-liquids may break down junctions between cells found in the gut, leading to chronic inflammation.

The researchers said that two chemicals used as a base for all e-liquids, propylene glycol and vegetable glycerol were the cause of inflammation. However, at this stage more needs to be known about the method used by the researchers to expose the gut cells to vapour, as in real life conditions, any inhaled vapour is filtered by the lungs before entering the bloodstream and therefore interacting with any other body part.

Moreover, since vaping is only suggested as a safer alternative to smoking and/or as a quitting tool, it would have been ideal if the researchers had also exposed a set of gut cells to cigarette smoke for comparison, which they did not.