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Passive smoking and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease mortality: findings from the Japan collaborative cohort
Shigekazu Ukawa1, Akiko Tamakoshi2, Hiroshi Yatsuya3
1Department of Public Health, Hokkaido University Graduate School of Medicine, N15 W7, Kita-ku, Sapporo, Hokkaido, 060-0812, Japan.
Objectives:
To elucidate the association between passive smoking at home and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) mortality via a large-scale nationwide cohort study in Japan.
Methods:
Never smokers (n = 34,604) aged 40-79 years at baseline (1988-1990; 4884 men, 29,720 women) were included in the analysis. Passive smoking at home was measured based on self-reported frequency of weekly exposure to passive smoking at home. An inverse probability of treatment-weighted competing risk model was used to calculate the hazard ratio (HR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) for COPD mortality.
Results:
During a median follow-up of 16.4 years, 33 participants (10 men, 23 women) died of COPD. The HR for participants exposed to passive smoking at home ≤4 days per week or those who had almost daily exposure to passive smoking at home had a significantly increased risk of COPD mortality (HR 2.40, 95% CI 1.39-4.15, HR 2.88, 95% CI 1.68-4.93, respectively).
Conclusions:
The present findings suggest that avoiding passive smoking at home may be beneficial for preventing death due to COPD among never smokers.
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