Cigarette Additives - Doubts About Their Safety

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Main Category: Smoking / Quit Smoking
Article Date: 05 Jan 2012 - 8:00 PST

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According to an analysis published in PLoS Medicine, scientific research conducted by the tobacco industry on the safety of cigarette additives cannot be taken at face value.

Research leader Stanton Glantz from the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California in San Francisco and his team re-examined data from "Project MIX", a study that was conducted by the tobacco company Philip Morris, in which the company's scientists preformed a chemical analysis of the potential toxicity of 333 additives in cigarettes. The results of their study were published in Food and Chemical Toxicology in 2002.

The team decided to investigate the origin and design of "Project MIX" to compare it with their own independent analysis of the tobacco company's results. They utilized documents that became public after a lawsuit against the tobacco industry and found evidence of post-hoc changes in analytical protocols of internal documents after the company's scientists discovered that the additives increased the toxicity of cigarettes by increasing the number of particles in the cigarette smoke.

The researchers also made the crucial discovery that the tobacco company's published papers findings on toxicity in their original "Project MIX" analysis were obscured by adjusting data by Total Particulate Matter concentration. In their independent analysis, Glantz and his team investigated the additives in each cigarette and found an increase of 20% or more in 15 carcinogenic chemicals. They also discovered that the reason the Philip Morris study failed to detect many toxic biological effects was because their studies were not sufficiently large enough to reliably identify toxic effects.

According to Glantz and his team, the findings of their independent analysis should provide sufficient evidence to abolish using the tested additives, which include menthol, from cigarettes on public health grounds.

They conclude:

"The results demonstrate that toxins in cigarette smoke increase substantially when additives are put in cigarettes, including the level of [Total Particulate Matter]. In particular, regulatory authorities, including the [Food and Drug Administration] and similar agencies elsewhere, could use the Project MIX data to eliminate the use of these 333 additives (including menthol) from cigarettes."

Written by Petra Rattue
Copyright: Medical News Today
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