Passive smoking can raise kidney disease risk

Seoul, March 8 (IANS) Besides affecting your heart and lungs, exposure to second-hand or passive smoking can also raise the chances of chronic kidney disease (CKD), which can lead to renal failure, warns a new study.

The findings showed that individuals with less or more than 3 days of exposure per week had nearly double the risk of having kidney disease when compared with participants with no second-hand cigarette exposure.

"Second-hand smoke exposure at home or in the workplace is still prevalent despite legislative actions prohibiting public smoking," said Jung Tak Park from Yonsei University in Seoul.

"This exposure was found to be clearly related with CKD, even with less-frequent amounts of second-hand smoke exposure," Park added.

For the study, published in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, the team included 131,196 non-smokers and were classified into three groups: no-exposure, less than three days per week of exposure, and three or more days per week of exposure.

Cigarette smoking and exposure to second-hand smoking have been linked with higher risks of various diseases.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), smoking tobacco is globally the second leading cause of heart diseases after high blood pressure. Nearly 12 per cent of cardiovascular deaths worldwide occur due to tobacco abuse and second-hand smoking.

The global health body states that of the seven million lives that tobacco claims worldwide each year, almost 900,000 are passive-smokers.