Chronic bronchitis? Not tobacco smoke after all

Tobacco smoking is considered the leading cause of chronic bronchitis.

However, this is not necessarily true according to a new study in Respiratory Research.

Focusing on smoking also overlooks another, maybe more serious cause of chronic bronchitis—one you may be continuing to expose yourself to because you think it’s safe.

The research team, led by scientists from Karolinska Institute in Sweden, notice that the effects of tobacco smoke had been thoroughly studied throughout the decades, but that surprisingly little was known about how wood smoke can impact our lungs.

Given that approximately two billion people worldwide still use wood for heating and cooking, and given the number of hours that Americans sit around bonfires, this struck them as a huge oversight that they decided to rectify in their own study.

They created three miniature lung models from human lung cells: one representing normal lung tissue, another mimicking the lung tissue affected by chronic bronchitis, and a third model representing the alveolar region of the lung. The alveolar region is where the air we breathe passes into our blood stream.

They then exposed these models to real wood smoke via an electric wood smoker. The exposure was repeated over a short period, five sessions across three days, with each session lasting ten minutes.

This is what they found:

1. Wood smoke contains 147 unique compounds, with 42 known to harm lungs, and at least nine posing very high risks.

2. After wood smoke exposure, the normal lung model showed an 11.2% increase in harmful reactive oxygen species, while the chronic bronchitis model saw a 25.7% increase. This suggests oxidative stress and lung damage.

3. Wood smoke activated a stress response protein called NFkB in both the normal and bronchitis models, showing that lung cells were under stress.

4. All models showed alterations in gene function. The normal model showed alterations in 1,262 genes, the bronchitis model in 329 genes, and the alveolar model in 102 genes. The changes related to the activation of pathways associated with inflammation, oxidative stress, and mitochondrial dysfunction.

5. Some affected genes in the normal lung model were linked to the ability of our lungs to clear pollutants, dust, and mucus, suggesting that chronic uncleared mucus and dirt could be a consequence of wood smoke.

All of this shows that wood smoke is potentially damaging.

One of the most interesting findings, however, was that our lungs seem to take desperate steps to protect themselves when they are already damaged and exposed to wood smoke.

Markers of inflammation were lower in the chronic bronchitis model after such exposure, indicating a last-ditch effort to save our lungs from further harm.

Therefore, next time you sit beside your bonfire or barbecue, try to keep some distance and limit the amount of time for which you bathe your lungs in the smoke.

The most important thing is to take steps to get rid of your bronchitis for good. Thousands of readers have done just that by taking advantages of a simple path explained here…