Numerous factors shape how a person’s immune system reacts to infections and other challenges. Age, sex and genetics are fundamental contributors—as the COVID pandemic highlighted. Now a new study shows that smoking has an equally important impact on certain immune responses, with some of its effects possibly lasting well beyond when a person quits.
To explore which environmental factors had the biggest role, researchers measured the production of cytokines—key messenger molecules that mediate inflammation—in the blood of 1,000 healthy people after exposing the samples to either bacteria, fungi, antibodies or other agents known to elicit an immune response. Smoking was found to greatly alter both the innate response—the body’s general and immediate first line of defense—and the slower, more threat-specific adaptive response. The data suggest that the cytokine secretion in the innate immune response rapidly returns to the level of nonsmokers after a person quits smoking but that the effects on the adaptive response appear to endure for years or decades through a process called epigenetic memory. The results were published today in Nature.
“It was a very large study, so that gives you confidence [in] the results,” says Yasmin Thanavala, an immunologist at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center who did not participate in the research. Moreover, “[the authors] looked across a broad range of [immune] stimuli, and that’s an interesting aspect,” she adds.
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The new findings add to the vast body of evidence on the damaging health effects of cigarette smoking. Smoking increases the risk for cardiovascular disease and lung cancer. It is responsible for about 90 percent of all lung…
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