Publisher's Synopsis
This is a publication comprising the proceedings of a symposium - "Nicotine, smoking and the low tar programme", held in November 1986, which aimed to form a base on which informed public health decisions on reducing harmful yields of tobacco smoke can be made and revised. Whilst the long-standing policy of reducing the harmful yields of tobacco smoke has been kept under constant review, only lately has sufficient data emerged to give some indication of the effects on health that these reductions may have had. The importance of tar in relation to lung diseases has been well discussed and documented, but the role played by nicotine in numerous smoking-related diseases has been less clear.;That nicotine confers benefits to the smoker is discussed, as is its role in compensatory smoking. Important attention was focused on whether nicotine may be a co-carcinogen but the evidence remains equivocal.;Other aspects on the toxicity of nicotine were also considered, for example the possibility that nicotine may affect hormone-dependent disorders such as endometrial cancer and osteoporosis.
