Tobacco Research
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Tobacco Research Resources
Journal Articles
Click here for a list of recent articles on tobacco research.
Fact Sheets
Click here to download the Environmental Tobacco Smoke Fact Sheet.
Web Sites
- The National Institute on Drug Abuse InfoFact sheet discusses statistics associated with smoking and tobacco use, health hazards, promising research, and treatments that are available to help smokers quit. It is also available in Spanish. www.drugabuse.gov/Infofax/tobacco.html.
- The following booklet was created as a supplement to Treating Tobacco Use and Dependence: a Public Health Service Clinical Practice Guideline. The booklet contains evidence-based strategies and recommendations to motivate and assist smokers in choosing the best way for them to quit smoking: www.ahrq.gov/clinic/tobacco/clinhlpsmksqt.pdf.
- National Cancer Institute website for tobacco: www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/tobacco.
- American Cancer Society website for tobacco: www.cancer.org/docroot/PED/ped_10.asp.
- Resources on Smokefree DC: www.smokefreedc.org/resources.htm.
Research Posters
Annual Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center Research Fair, April 15, 2005, Washington, DC.
Effects of nicotine and cigarette smoking on the human lymphocyte transcriptome.
Jinguo Chen, Ramona G Dumitrescu, Antai Wang, Christopher Loffredo, Zumei Feng, Peter G Shields . Georgetown University Lombardi Cancer Center, Washington DC.
Nicotine has a wide range of toxic effects on neuronal and non-neuronal cells, including those on addiction and carcinogenic pathways through nicotinic receptors and other not well-defined pathways. Using Affymetrix HG-U133A GeneChips, we investigated global gene expression in peripheral lymphocytes from 22 current healthy smokers. Isolated lymphocytes from blood, PHA-stimulated cultured lymphocytes and PHA-stimulated lymphocytes co-cultured with nicotine were assayed. Total RNA was isolated using TRIzol reagent and purified with RNeasy kit. All other procedures were performed according to manufacture’s protocols. The array data were analyzed with dChip V1.3 software based on both statistical significance levels and fold-change differences. Arrays that failed to pass several quality-control checkpoints were excluded. For cultured lymphocytes in vitro, expression patterns of some 1789 genes were significantly altered after exposure to nicotine for 4 hours. But only 99 were nicotine-associated genes reported in the literature. A small subset of approximately 74 genes had an absolute fold-change >1.5. Because nicotine is the major component of cigarette smoking, we examined the transcriptomes of uncultured lymphocytes. Compared with light smokers, the heavy smokers who smoked 20 cigarettes or more per day gave a different expression signature. A sum of 845 genes were changed. Among them, 82 overlapped with the above 1789 nicotine-associated genes and some were immune genes and oncogenes. About 226 had an absolute fold-change >1.5, but only 9 of which also appeared in the list of 74 genes after nicotine treatment, few of which were nicotine-related. These genes included phospholipase A2 receptor 1, PLC beta 1, MCF2L2. The data from this study demonstrate that nicotine treatment in vitro changes a large set of gene expression pathways and more exposure to cigarette smoking in vivo also causes a different gene expression signature. Those genes that are nicotine responsive both in in vitro and in vivo deserve further attention as potentially critically important in addiction or carcinogenic pathways, or both.
Click here to download a pdf of the poster.
