Documents smoke 5 results

"Italian researchers from the Occupational Medicine Institute at the University of Sassari have completed a study on the causes of visual fatigue for video display terminals (VDT) workers in office environments. Specifically, they examined the part played by psychological factors in complaints about visual health reported by banking officers who work at VDTs. 212 people were asked to respond to three different questionnaires on subjects of job stress, subjective discomfort related to environmental and lighting conditions, and existence of oculovisual disturbances. Eye strain included itchy, sore, or heavy eyes, and blurred or double vision during or immediately after work three or more times a week. All subjects shared the same environment and work duties, and none had any history of eye problems. The study found that social support, group conflict, self esteem, work satisfaction, and under use of skills were found to be predictors of visual complaints. Subjective environmental factors, although in some cases significantly correlated with asthenopia, were not found to be strong predictors of the symptoms. Employees who felt they received social support were a third less likely to report eye strain. Lighting did not seem to affect levels of eye strain, but noise and environmental tobacco smoke did.The researchers concluded that some part of the complaints about visual health reported by VDT workers are likely indirect expressions of psychological discomfort related to working conditions. "

"Objectives Smoke generated during laser surgery and electrocautery contains respiratory irritants and human carcinogens. Although laboratory and animal studies have demonstrated that this smoke has inflammatory and mutagenic potential, no population-based studies of the health effects of exposure to surgical smoke have been published. We examined the association between duration of employment as an operating room nurse, a proxy measure for surgical smoke exposure, and subsequent lung cancer risk.Methods This study was conducted among 86 747 women in the Nurses' Health Study. Information on the duration of prior operating room employment was collected in 1984, and the women were followed for incident, confirmed lung cancer. Cox proportional hazards regression was used to model the incidence rate ratio of lung cancer for each exposure category using women with no prior operating room employment for comparison. All of the models were adjusted for age, smoking history, passive smoke exposure, fruit and vegetable consumption, and alpha carotene and lycopene intake. Results A history of operating room employment was not associated with an increased rate of lung cancer in multivariable analyses [rate ratio (RR) 0.99, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) 0.86–1.15]. In fact, nurses in the highest exposure category, =15 years of operating room employment, had a significantly lower rate of lung cancer than nurses with no prior operating room employment (RR 0.58, 95% CI 0.37–0.91), possibly due to confounding by overall health status or residual confounding by smoking history.Conclusions Long-term exposure to surgical smoke, as measured by the duration of operating room employment, does not appear to increase the risk of lung cancer."

"Background
Wildfire events are increasing in prevalence in the western United States. Research has found mixed results on the degree to which exposure to wildfire smoke is associated with an increased risk of mortality.
Methods
We tested for an association between exposure to wildfire smoke and non-traumatic mortality in Washington State, USA. We characterized wildfire smoke days as binary for grid cells based on daily average PM2.5 concentrations, from June 1 through September 30, 2006–2017. Wildfire smoke days were defined as all days with assigned monitor concentration above a PM2.5 value of 20.4 μg/m3, with an additional set of criteria applied to days between 9 and 20.4 μg/m3. We employed a case-crossover study design using conditional logistic regression and time-stratified referent sampling, controlling for humidex. ..."