Tobacco Documents Online

REVIEW 1138 CONFIDENTIAL Subject ref 8b "Environmental tobacco smoke and non-fatal myocardial infarction among never-smokers" M Rosenlund et al Epidemiology (2000), 11, S103 The attached abstract briefly describes results from a relatively large Swedish case-control study involving 334 non-fatal never smoking cases of myocardial infarction (MI) and 677 age, sex and area matched population controls (presumably also never smoking). Data on ETS and other risk factors for MI were obtained by postal questionnaire. The abstract describes some of the results of comparisons adjusted for the matching variables and various other MI risk factors - body mass index, socioeconomic status, job strain, hypertension and diet. These show marginally significant increases (lower confidence limit = 1.0) associated with maximum ETS exposures, with relative risk estimates of 1.6 (95% CI 1.0- 2.6) for 20+ cigarettes a day at home exposure or 1.56 (1.0-2.3) for 90+ hour-years exposure at home or at work (an hour-year is equivalent to I hour/day for 1 year). Without seeing more complete details of the study it is difficult to have a firm impression. Possible problems are likely to include recall bias, given the exposure data were collected afer the MI, lack of objective assessment of ETS (e.g. by cotinine), selection bias due to the probable low response to postal questionnaires, and the lack of data on fatal MI cases. It seems likely to appear as a full paper in the next year or so, inasmuch as I know that Nyberg and Pershagen (the last two authors) publish widely. P N Lee 17.1.2001