Hookah Smoke Far More Harmful Than Cigarettes

BEACON TRANSCRIPT – News about smoking seems to have exploded ever since the “raising the smoking age to 21” scandal began, and for good reason. With so many opposing opinions, it’s difficult not to pay attention to one or the other. The most recent study from the University of Pittsburgh reveals hookah smoke far more harmful than cigarettes.

The new study, performed by researchers at the University Of Pittsburgh School Of Medicine, is a meta-analysis of 542 different studies related to the matter. Well, at least that’s how it started out, as they limited the relevant research to just 17 studies.

Being a meta-analysis, the study didn’t actually have subjects or anything like that. What it means is that the researchers looked at the results from all the other different studies, and came up with a conclusion based on those.

Other factors that weren’t included in the original studies aren’t accounted for, thus the vagueness of the subsequent research.

Being unable to accurately equate hookah smoking sessions with cigarette smoking sessions, the team of researchers went ahead and presented the data that they did manage to find.

Comparing a hookah session with a cigarette, the researchers discovered that the first one is responsible for delivering 2.5 times the nicotine, 10 times the carbon monoxide, 25 times the tar, and 125 times the smoke of the latter.

However, due to pretty big difficulties in relating hookah use to cigarette use due to the types of smokers having different patterns, not much else was able to be determined.

For example, a regular smoker can smoke anywhere between 10 and 30 cigarettes a day, while a regular hookah user can smoke anywhere from a few times a week to a couple of times a day.

There are way too many variables for the researchers to say exactly which one is worse for you, but they do warn that by partaking in hookah smoking you may be in taking more harmful chemicals than you believe.

What the team was able to ascertain was that for the first time ever, U.S. high school students report more cases of smoking hookahs than cigarettes.

This means that despite the CDC’s report that cigarette smokers are at an all-time low in the United States, people might have simply substituted cigarettes for something else.

Funded by the National Cancer Institute, the research may not be as insightful as the researchers hoped it would be, but several others will follow, and they will hopefully manage to determine more relevant data.

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