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> ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Caryle" <[log in to unmask]> > To: <[log in to unmask]> > Sent: Saturday, June 05, 2004 10:49 AM > Subject: Infromal Poll > > > > I was wondering if you all would be willing to help me out with an > informal poll about second hand smoke. > > > > If you were exposed to second hand smoke for an exteded peroid of time can > you answer these question: > > > > 1. How many years were you exposed? > > 2. How old were you? > > 3. How old were you when you first experienced Parkinson's symptoms? > > 1. 22 2. 0-22 (both parents smoked ca 2 packs/day each) 3. 56 A few comments come to mind. They may or may not be relevant, but perhaps some might find them interesting. The idea of relating duration of exposure to second-hand smoke with interval between exposure and PD onset is an interesting one. From the answers so far it seems there's a lot of variation, but the numbers are small at this point. If the purpose of your poll were to investigate possible correlation between second-hand-smoke exposure and PD, I think you'd need to ask a largish number of PWP _whether_ they were exposed. Then you'd need to eliminate or account for other experiences they might or might not have in common, like living in big polluted cities, sharing various eating and drinking habits, working with potentially toxic materials (pesticides, herbicides, solder, cleaning agents, solvents, bleach...) and on and on... Retrospective studies can be (usually are) horribly difficult because of all the known and unknown factors that may interfere. Anybody know the proportion of the population of Shanghai that has PD? How does it compare with the PD rate in Hungary, which has about the same population (slightly smaller, actually) but, having both urban and rural areas, exhibits a much wider range of exposure to pollutants? Sounds like an interesting comparison, doesn't it? But the enormous dietary and lifestyle differences between those two populations would make it essentially impossible to draw any conclusion about pollutant exposure, even if there were a significant difference in the proportion of PD. (That leaves aside the whole genetic question, about which I know too little to comment.) I remember being told in the late seventies that one could live in Toronto and not smoke, or live in Moosonee and smoke two packs a day, and one's lungs would look about the same at autopsy. Such a life would involve a reasonably low risk of dying of lung cancer. But if one lived in Toronto _and_ smoked two packs a day, one had a ten percent chance of dying of lung cancer, though one might still live to be 90 first. I'd expect most effects of tobacco smoke exposure, primary or secondary, to vary with local air quality in a similar way. -- | G r e g L o u i s | gpg public key: 0x400B1AA86D9E3E64 | | http://www.bgl.nu/~glouis | (on my website or any keyserver) | | http://wecanstopspam.org in signatures helps fight junk email. | ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn