Evaluation of Personal Exposure to Environmental Tobacco Smoke in Daily Life -Twenty-four hour measurement and estimation of cigarette equivalent

摘要

Background For smokers and non-smokers are engaged in social life comfortably together, it is important to minimize the passive smoking of non-smokers. The entire purpose of our study is to identify some indicators of passive smoking exposure that can be agreed socially and scientifically, and to quantify the degree of passive smoking. Aims In this paper, we report the personal exposure measurementto explore the actual condition of ETS exposure in current days in Japan and the calculation of CE (cigarette equivalent) to evaluate how much amount of passive smoking should correspond to the amount of active smoking. Methods Subjects were university students, et al. SPM (suspended particulate matter), carbonyl, nicotine and3-EP (3-ethenylpyridine) were measured by using personal samplers for 24-hours. They were also asked to record the number of active and passive smoking and time activity pattern. Results Mean personal exposure levels of SPM, nicotine and 3-EP were the highest among active-smokers even not so high, and the lowest among non-smokers. Mean SPM concentration were 41.1 μg/m3 among active-smokers, 30.1μg/m3 among passive-smokersand 12.5μg/m3 among non-smokers. It was not observed clear relationship between measured exposure levels and the number of passive smoking and other tobacco related factors. It should be difficult to assess ETS exposure levels quantitatively by questionnaire. ROC(receiver operating curve) analysis showed that non-smokers and passive smokers could be classified based on nicotine exposure. CE exposures estimated based on nicotine were shown 0.25-10.5cigarettes per year. Conclusion It will be necessary to develop more sensitive passive samplers, and lightweight and quiet active samplers for ETS exposure assessment. Also, it should be required to consider how to evaluate health effects due to low ETS exposure. This work was supported in part by a grant from the Smoking Research Foundation.