Clinical trials show certain toxicants reduced in novel smoking products

British American Tobacco is pressing on with research into cigarettes that deliver reduced levels of toxicants despite the fact that the company doesn’t know whether it will be possible to prove scientifically that such cigarettes reduce health risks.

“There are already tobacco and nicotine products available, such as snus and e-cigarettes, that are known to pose substantially lower risk than cigarettes,” Dr. David O’Reilly, group scientific director at British American Tobacco said in a story published by EurekAlert on Friday.

“And we don’t know whether it will be possible to scientifically prove that reduced toxicant cigarettes reduce health risks. But we believe reducing smokers’ exposure to cigarette smoke toxicants continues to be an important research objective, given the numbers of people who smoke and the numbers who are likely to continue to smoke for the foreseeable future.”

The EurekAlert piece quoted BAT as saying it had shown in its first clinical study of its novel prototype cigarettes that it was possible to reduce smokers’ exposure to certain smoke toxicants.

‘We have spent several decades researching the nature of tobacco smoke, identifying key toxicants and developing technologies to reduce the levels of some toxicants in smoke,’ BAT was quoted as saying. ‘Laboratory tests show that our technologies successfully reduce levels of some, though not all, toxicants in smoke. This is our first clinical study of our test products and it shows an average reduction in smokers’ exposure to certain toxicants over the study period.’

BAT said however that the only way to be certain of avoiding the risks of smoking was not to smoke. ‘And reducing the health risks of smoking has been the overriding aim of tobacco research for many years. It is known that the risk of developing smoking-related disease is greater in people who smoke more cigarettes per day and for longer periods.’

The full story is at: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-03/raba-rse032213.php.