Secondhand Smoke Raises Stroke Risk for Spouses

(HealthDay News) -- Nonsmokers who are married to smokers run a significantly higher risk for experiencing a stroke, a new study suggests.

Researchers also found that ex-smokers married to men and women who still smoke carry an even greater risk for stroke. However, nonsmoking spouses of former smokers do not appear to bear any higher risk for stroke than those married to someone who had never smoked.

"This adds to the growing evidence that secondhand smoke is bad for you, and I hope that it will help people who want to stop smoking to know that it will probably be good for their spouse's health, too," said Maria Glymour, an assistant professor of society, human development and health at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. Glymour is also a health and society scholar in the department of epidemiology at Columbia University in New York City.

She and her team were expected to publish the findings in the September issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Glymour pointed out that hers is one of the few studies to specifically focus on the potential link between secondhand smoke and stroke risk. She further noted that indications that the association is real and strong stem from a larger National Institute on Aging research effort that tracked a wide range of social factors and their relationship to stroke risk.

In that study, all 16,000-plus participants were 50 and older and married. All were categorized according to smoking habits, and observed for stroke incidence over an average of about nine years between 1992 and 2006.

Nonsmokers married to a current smoker were found to have a 42 percent increased risk for stroke, compared with those married to spouses who had never smoked. Similarly compared, ex-smokers married to a current smoker had a 72 percent increased risk for stroke.

As for those married to ex-smokers, Glymour and her team only observed that the former smokers had kicked their habit at some point one to 50 years before the start of the study. They could not pinpoint exactly how much time would need to elapse after a smoking spouse quits before their husband or wife's stroke risk fully dissipated.

"But we think the risk to the spouse probably starts to decline right away," Glymour noted. "And that would be consistent with what we already know about stroke and active smoking, which is that if you stop smoking your own health risks decline quickly."

Thomas J. Glynn, director of cancer science and trends at the American Cancer Society, said that he found Glymour's analysis to be "very reasonable."

"I agree that one might expect a fairly steep drop-off in stroke risk for the spouse once the smoking partner quits," he said. "We know, for example, that although it takes about 15 years of not smoking to halve your risk for lung cancer, with heart disease it may take not much more than one to two years of cessation to cut back one's own risk to basically that of a nonsmoker, depending on how long you had been smoking. So, this conclusion makes sense."

"And, in general, I would say that this study provides further valuable evidence of the general dangers of secondhand smoke, and, in particular, the great and often over-looked danger of heart disease, he said. And, of course, it emphasizes the need for anyone who smokes to stop smoking, and at a minimum to establish smoke-free zones in the home, or not smoke in the home at all."

More information
For more about secondhand smoke and health risks, visit the American Lung Association.

Spinal Cord Stem Cells May Act as Nerve Repair System

(HealthDay News) -- Adult stem cells that may prove valuable in efforts to develop nonsurgical treatments for spinal cord injuries have been identified by researchers in the United States and Sweden.

They say it may be possible to develop drugs that boost the ability of these stem cells to repair damaged nerve cells.

An adult's spinal cord contains only a small number of stem cells, which proliferate slowly or rarely and don't promote regeneration on their own. But some research has shown that spinal cord stem cells grown in the lab and returned to the injury site can restore some physical function in paralyzed rodents and primates.

In this new study, scientists at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory in Cambridge, Mass., and at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm found that neural stem cells in the adult spinal cord are limited to a layer of cells called ependymal cells, which make up the thin membrane lining the inner-brain ventricles and the connecting central column of the spinal cord.
"We have been able to genetically mark this neural stem cell population and then follow their behavior. We find that these cells proliferate upon spinal cord injury, migrate toward the injury site and differentiate over several months," study author Konstantinos Meletis said in an MIT news release.

"The ependymal cells' ability to turn into several different cell types upon injury makes them very interesting from an intervention aspect. Imagine if we could regulate the behavior of this stem cell population to repair damaged nerve cells," Meletis said.

The research was published in the July issue of PLoS Medicine.

More information
The U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke has more about spinal cord injury.

Health Tip: Teens and Sleep

(HealthDay News) -- Teenagers need to get plenty of sleep -- between 8 1/2 and nine hours every night -- to feel good and keep their bodies healthy.

Pay attention to these warning signs, courtesy of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, that you may not be getting enough shuteye:

• Difficulty getting out of bed in the morning.


• Problems focusing.


• Falling asleep at school during class.


• Feeling depressed, irritable, moody or sad.

Relationship Violence Common Among College Students

(HealthDay News) -- Violence between partners, friends and acquaintances is common before and during college, a new study shows.

Researchers surveyed 910 undergraduates aged 17 to 22 (57.1 percent female) at three urban college campuses to detect this trend.

Among the findings:

• 407 (44.7 percent) of respondents said they experienced violence either before or during college, including 383 (42.1 percent) who said they were victims and 156 (17.1 percent) who said they were perpetrators.
• 53 percent of women and 27.2 percent of men reported being victims.
• Rates of being a perpetrator or victim were higher before college than during college.
• More than half (130 of 227 reports) of violent incidents during college involved a partner, rather than a friend or acquaintance.
• Emotional violence was most common before college (21.1 percent), while sexual and emotional violence were equally common during college (12 percent and 11.8 percent).
• Men were more likely to commit sexual violence, while women were more likely to commit physical violence.

"In conclusion, all forms of relationship violence are prevalent among male and female college students; almost half of students had experienced relationship violence at some point in their lives, more than one-third had experienced violence before college, and one-quarter had experienced violence during college," wrote Christine M. Forke, of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Emotional violence was the most common form of violence at all ages.

"While emotional abuse frequently is not a focus of violence prevention, it can cause poor outcomes and may predispose victims to other forms of violence. Therefore, educational efforts focusing on healthy relationships should begin during childhood," the researchers wrote.

The study is published in the July issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

More information
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offers advice about health and safety in college.