Hecht said that tobacco smoke in homes with central heating and air conditioning systems tends to spread throughout a house. About the only safe thing that a woman who lives with a smoker can do is to tell him to go outside when he smokes. Most epidemiologic studies find a higher risk for lung cancer in nonsmoking women married to smokers than in those married to nonsmokers. We recruited women and their partners through advertisements. Unpaired Student's t tests were conducted on log-transformed values.
All statistical tests are two-sided.
Urinary levels of nicotine, cotinine, NNAL, and NNAL-Gluc were statistically significantly higher in exposed women than in unexposed women. Nonsmoking women exposed to ETS take up and metabolize the tobacco-specific lung carcinogen NNK, which could increase their risk of lung cancer.