Brutal Reality of Life and Smoking

[Lakewood90712]

We buried one of our middle managers this week. Age 59, Heavy smoker from age 9. One of the few "Good Guys" who stood up for those of us at the bottom of the food chain at the city .

5 weeks ago , he went to the doctor with breathing problems, spent 3 days in the hospital , came into the office to clear his calendar. Told us the bad news. One week ago, into the hospital with renal failure.

26 years service, was staying to get the next promotion and 30 years. He could have retired several years ago.

The worst part , the jackels wanting to promote didn't wait for the body to cool down .

Another bitter reminder to look at the big picture and forget about getting the last coins on the table.

 

[frayne]

The brutal reality of life, is death. Saw a number of good friends buy the farm in their 40s, 50s, & early 60s from pancreatic cancer, heart attacks, lung cancer, colon cancer, etc. Have also seen a number of co-workers go straight from the work place and into the ground. Life is short and precious and staying for that last nickel or just one more years usually results in just one more nickel and one more year. Everyone has a choice.

 

[Zero]

I worked with a fellow who had closely guarded his "specialty" of installing large racks of communications equipment, so that he got every assignment as manager. It meant constant travel, per diem, mega thousands of FF miles, and lots of overtime. To the point that he was filthy rich by 55 and not shy about mentioning it. Not a well liked fellow and he hung on till he was 70.

He finally retired (got asked to) and he and his wife bought a MEGA mansion at the beach, she died about 4 months later from pancreatic cancer. No children, and no real close family.

His favorite saying was, "Don't leave anything on the table.". And he would mention just have good he was at that game.

 

[antmary]

Sorry to hear about your friend, Lakewood90712. Life, is, indeed precious.

 

[frank]

I noticed the mention of smoking, but fail to make the connection to renal failure. I have lost lots of my friends and acquaintances over the years and have seen people who never smoked die from some form of pulmonary disease and some from liver or kidney disease that never took a drink. my take away from this is that you should live your life to the fullest and do whatever makes you the happiest, no matter what that may be. as said previouly on this thread, life is short.

 

[ls99]

Chances are smoking is what kept him going.

Had a Philosophy and logic prof. Had throat cancer. Constant coughing unless she smoked. She'd light up a cig in class to stop the cough and went on teaching. Had her as prof several semesters.

Great teacher, unfortunately she died a week before finals. Often after class she showed up at the same gin mill I hung out. Got the the best Philosophy elaborations, and many good arguments in the Socratic sense, over Black Russians. Sometime her brother an English prof would show up to broaden the arguments. Oh yeah I was in mid thirties when attended college as part timer.

 

[Lakewood90712]

I noticed the mention of smoking, but fail to make the connection to renal failure. I have lost lots of my friends and acquaintances over the years and have seen people who never smoked die from some form of pulmonary disease and some from liver or kidney disease that never took a drink. my take away from this is that you should live your life to the fullest and do whatever makes you the happiest, no matter what that may be. as said previouly on this thread, life is short.

I suspect the cancer had spread to other organs even before the Dx of lung cancer, and got to the kidneys. The lung cancer was so advanced, it was a situation of living a few weeks w/o treatment , or a few more weeks with chemo , radiation , etc. I think I would also chose the former , if in the same position.

 

[EvrClrx311]

New studies on cigarette smoking and how it can alter your DNA are pretty scary...

Smokers experience one mutation to their DNA for every 15 cigarettes they smoked, according to a study that mapped out the genetic blueprint of a lung cancer patient.
British researchers led the massive international project, which identified 23,000 mutations that bore the expected signs of damage caused by chemicals in tobacco smoke.

'Mutations in DNA caused by, for example, cigarette smoke are passed on to every subsequent generation of daughter cells, a permanent record of the damage done.
'Like an archaeologist, we can begin to reconstruct the history of the cancer clone - revealing a record of past exposure and accumulated damage in the genome.'

Other studies have linked obesity, autism, allergies and many other health problems to genetic mutations from smoking that carries for generations. This isn't just second hand smoke we're talking about.

That is, if your grandmother smoked for 10 years from the age of 15-25 and then had your mother at the age of 30 and never smoked around her... you could pay the price for it anyways even if you and your mother were never exposed to smoke.

That said, I know there are a lot of things that people do that are unhealthy (eating fatty food, drinking, to name a few), but if there is even a small risk that you are causing damage to your own future offspring for generations... well that's reason enough for me to tell my own kids I'm writing them out of the will if they decide to smoke at any point in their lives (maybe I'll have to re-think how I get that point across since teenagers are likely to do exactly what you tell them not to ).

Smoking just 15 cigarettes harms your DNA, finds cancer study on gene mutation | Mail Online

 

[Richard4444]

Sorry for your loss, Lakewood. Smoking does shorten the average lifespan by 14 years - too many.

 

[BigNick]

Just heard of the third fatal cancer in my circle of acquaintances and colleagues this year:
- January 1, colleague 1 had a cough over Christmas which wouldn't go away, went to doctor, diagnosis: stage 4 lung cancer. ("The only thing you need to know about stage 4 cancer is there is no stage 5" - Christopher Hitchens.) Never smoked a cigarette in his life.
- January 15, colleague 2 died from some lymphoma or other; I found out that he had had no symptoms until mid-November.
- Last week, a friend's wife died from breast cancer, six months after her first diagnosis.

To add to that, another colleague had a stroke over Christmas. Aged 46. She hasn't been back to work yet, and we don't expect her to return.

Me? I'm becoming a full member of the class of 2012 in a month's time.

 

[Alan]

Me? I'm becoming a full member of the class of 2012 in a month's time.

Nice.

 

[Bikerdude]

Time for the old standby:

 

[jerome len]

three of us started working at the same company 28 years ago. We all smoked and ate tons of sweet snacks. I have a great Doc, she chewed me out and got me to stop smoking and switch to fruit and veggies..... as a result of lousy check ups.

the guy that didn't stop smoking...........died of lung cancer. The guy that didn't stop eating tons of sugar...........died of diabetics. Both younger than me.

We control our future to some degree..................I really can't believe when I see chubby older folks eating food bad for them or even worse, when I see anyone smoking. But to each their own........Our generation has the knowledge and help to live healthy......if we don't, we only have ourselves to blame.

 

[Amethyst]

Each to his/her own, as you say...as many sad examples show, clean living is no guarantee of health, and some folks get more pleasure out of over-eating, smoking, etc. than they would from being healthy anyway. I think that to persist in clean-living over the long haul, one has to take some kind of pleasure in it. Otherwise, it is just too hard, and guarantees no reward other than itself.

Hard as it is to believe, and rare as I hope it must be, I even know people who appear to enjoy the familial and medical attention they get due to their numerous health issues. One woman brags about how she puts doctors "in their place" when they dare to tell her that her diabetic issues are related to weighing more than twice what is considered "healthy." She is in the ER for one thing or another twice a year, and it is always a big drama, which she plays to the hilt. Yet, who is to say she won't outlive a clean-liver who draws a bad card in the genetic lottery?

Amethyst

We control our future to some degree..................I really can't believe when I see chubby older folks eating food bad for them or even worse, when I see anyone smoking. But to each their own........Our generation has the knowledge and help to live healthy......if we don't, we only have ourselves to blame.

 

[Richard4444]

Living in So Florida, one does not see many older obese smokers.

 

[TromboneAl]

That is, if your grandmother smoked for 10 years from the age of 15-25 and then had your mother at the age of 30 and never smoked around her... you could pay the price for it anyways even if you and your mother were never exposed to smoke.

I'm not clear on this. My understanding is that in order to pass anything on, the DNA in the cells of your sperm or eggs must have mutated. Each cell in your body has it's own copy of your DNA, and I picture smoking as causing random mutations in random cells throughout the body. If the DNA in a lung cell is changed, the DNA in your other cells are not affected. So mutations would be passed on only if cells within a sperm or egg are affected. Certainly this could happen after years of smoking, but would not be common.

When they say "Mutations in DNA caused by, for example, cigarette smoke are passed on to every subsequent generation of daughter cells" they are referring to daughter cells produced by dividing cells in your body -- not the cells of your daughter.

My limited genetics knowledge is rusty, so refresh my memory here.

 

[EvrClrx311]

I'm not clear on this. My understanding is that in order to pass anything on, the DNA in the cells of your sperm or eggs must have mutated. Each cell in your body has it's own copy of your DNA, and I picture smoking as causing random mutations in random cells throughout the body. If the DNA in a lung cell is changed, the DNA in your other cells are not affected. So mutations would be passed on only if cells within a sperm or egg are affected. Certainly this could happen after years of smoking, but would not be common.

When they say "Mutations in DNA caused by, for example, cigarette smoke are passed on to every subsequent generation of daughter cells" they are referring to daughter cells produced by dividing cells in your body -- not the cells of your daughter.

My limited genetics knowledge is rusty, so refresh my memory here.

I'm certainly no expert in the field and am just passing on medical jargon I've read... from the other articles addressing the passing of mutations they usually talked about RNA being the carrier. From what I understand of RNA... it can carry genetics to future generations without showing in the current one.

Another interesting study was done on food famines and how they can change DNA. They were showing that men who experienced food shortages early in their life, and women who experienced them during pregnancy would turn on or off genetic markers in the RNA that would show up two generations down the line. So there was no affect on the next generation... but the one after would be more likely to be obese (for example)

one of them really caught my attention... and I forget the exact correlation, but I believe it was men who experience famine at a young age, had their longevity gene turned on for their sons children.

So if your paternal grandfather grew up in the great depression and experienced a malnutrition period, the RNA passed down turned on genetic markers for you that make you more likely to live longer than you otherwise would.

Crazy stuff... imagine what will come in the next decades as they learn to turn these things on and off at will.

Here is one such study as it related to cardiovascular diseases being linked to parents/grandparents nutrition:
http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v10/n11/full/5200859a.html

 

[Khufu]

When they say "Mutations in DNA caused by, for example, cigarette smoke are passed on to every subsequent generation of daughter cells" they are referring to daughter cells produced by dividing cells in your body -- not the cells of your daughter.

My limited genetics knowledge is rusty, so refresh my memory here.

I don't think this is true. Queen Victoria apparently had a spontaneous mutation of the hemophilia gene which she then passed on through her daughters to various crowned heads, including ultimately the Tsarevitch Alexis.

 

[frank]

The government, in order to extract billions of dollars from big tobacco and taxpayers, has connected the dots between smoking and just about every ailment known to man. sooner or later somebody will have to accept the fact that smoking is not connected to every death in this country and now they are trying to pass the danger to the next generation through changes in dna. I wonder how the government is going to get people to pay for problems that haven't arisen yet and might never happen?

 

[SJ1_]

The brutal reality of life, is death. Saw a number of good friends buy the farm in their 40s, 50s, & early 60s from pancreatic cancer, heart attacks, lung cancer, colon cancer, etc. Have also seen a number of co-workers go straight from the work place and into the ground. Life is short and precious and staying for that last nickel or just one more years usually results in just one more nickel and one more year. Everyone has a choice.

+1

I could not of said it better.

 

[TromboneAl]

I'm not clear on this. My understanding is that in order to pass anything on, the DNA in the cells of your sperm or eggs must have mutated. Each cell in your body has it's own copy of your DNA, and I picture smoking as causing random mutations in random cells throughout the body. If the DNA in a lung cell is changed, the DNA in your other cells are not affected. So mutations would be passed on only if cells within a sperm or egg are affected. Certainly this could happen after years of smoking, but would not be common.

When they say "Mutations in DNA caused by, for example, cigarette smoke are passed on to every subsequent generation of daughter cells" they are referring to daughter cells produced by dividing cells in your body -- not the cells of your daughter.

My limited genetics knowledge is rusty, so refresh my memory here.

I Googled it and found:

When you have a genetic mutation, you have a permanent change in the DNA sequence of that gene. Some genetic mutations can be passed on to your children. This is referred to as a germline mutation and is made possible only when the mutation targets genes inside the cells responsible for making sperm and eggs. Once it's passed on to you by a parent, it appears in nearly all of your body's cells.​

 

[BigNick]

I Googled it and found:

When you have a genetic mutation, you have a permanent change in the DNA sequence of that gene. Some genetic mutations can be passed on to your children. This is referred to as a germline mutation and is made possible only when the mutation targets genes inside the cells responsible for making sperm and eggs. Once it's passed on to you by a parent, it appears in nearly all of your body's cells.​

Al, you are essentially right. Damage to a parent's DNA is generally not heritable. There is a whole big complex field called Epigenetics (warning: article contains many, many big words which only people like #1 son understand) which studies how traits can be passed on other than by straight mixing of Mom and Dad's DNA. But for most people who smoke, the damage they do to their kids will be in utero or during childhood.

 

[73ss454]

The government, in order to extract billions of dollars from big tobacco and taxpayers, has connected the dots between smoking and just about every ailment known to man. sooner or later somebody will have to accept the fact that smoking is not connected to every death in this country and now they are trying to pass the danger to the next generation through changes in dna. I wonder how the government is going to get people to pay for problems that haven't arisen yet and might never happen?

Now, if they could only do something about the stink. Why anyone would want to smell like that is beyond me.