A recent study has found that non-smokers who live with a smoker are exposed to three times the officially recommended safe levels of damaging air particles. The researchers found that living with smokers is the same as living in smoke-free homes in heavily polluted cities such as Beijing or London. 
The study has been published online in the BMJ’s Tobacco Control journal. It was carried out by researchers at the universities of Edinburgh and Aberdeen.
They said, according to the BBC, that there was already strong evidence to suggest that exposure to second-hand smoke is linked to a wide range of adverse health events such as respiratory and heart illness. Many governments have introduced measures to restrict their population’s exposure to second hand smoke within workplace and leisure settings.
Fine particulate matter (PM2.5), such as fine dust or soot suspended in the air, has been widely used as a marker for second-hand smoke exposure.
The Scottish researchers set out to estimate the amount of PM2.5 inhaled by people living in smoking and non-smoking homes. They studied data from four linked studies carried out in Scotland between 2009 and 2013 that had real time measurements of PM2.5 in homes, and combined them with data on typical breathing rates and time-activity patterns.
Collectively, the studies produced air quality data from 93 smoking homes with a further 17 non-smoking households. The results showed that the average PM2.5 concentrations from the 93 smoking homes were about 10 times those found in the 17 non-smoking homes. Non-smokers living with smokers typically had average PM2.5 exposure levels more than three times higher than the World Health Organisation’s guidance for annual exposure to PM2.5.
Non-smokers living in smoking households would experience reductions of more than 70 per cent in their daily inhaled PM2.5 intake if their home became smoke-free, the researchers calculated, and the reduction was likely to be greatest for the very young and for older members of the population.
Lead author Dr Sean Semple, of Aberdeen University, said: “Smokers often express the view that outdoor air pollution is just as much a concern as the second-hand smoke in their home.
“These measurements show that second-hand tobacco smoke can produce very high levels of toxic particles in your home: much higher than anything experienced outside in most towns and cities in the UK.”
Another report shows that passive smoking causes lasting damage to children’s arteries, prematurely ageing their blood vessels by more than three years, say researchers. The damage – thickening of blood vessel walls – increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes in later life, they say in the European Heart Journal.
So, if you are a smoker and want to protect those you share your home with, visit a hypnotherapist from the National Council for Hypnotherapy’s directory and change your life –and those of the ones you love.
The hypnotherapist may find that you started within a peer group situation. Often this stems from our desire to blend in, to become part of a group, and of course in evolutionary terms we need to be accepted by a group as our protection comes from being within groups – that is how we evolved and survived.
But your physical addiction to cigarettes can be over after just one week while research shows that by quitting smoking with hypnosis you are three times more likely to give up than if you used nicotine patches.
The therapist will help you realise the importance of your motivation for giving up and they will then assess your commitment to the treatment as your desire to stop smoking must come from you.
Smokers often find it hard to stop smoking on their own but the hypnotherapy to stop smoking programme makes it much easier to stop and it can take just one session of two hours to break the habit.
Normally people will use their will power to try to stop. This creates irritability, mood swings, bad temper, cravings and possible weight gain. This tends not to happen when you use hypnotherapy for smoking cessation.
In some cases, hypnotherapy to stop smoking programme takes only one session of up to two hours.
