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Excerpts from: Smokers Families at Risk For Stroke

BY HELEN RUMBELOW, Times of London [08/31/00]

  SCIENTISTS have identified how parents who smoke
  make their children more likely to have heart disease or a
  stroke.

  In teenagers who lived with smoking parents, chemicals in
  the blood that encourage clotting were at levels a third
  higher than average and there were lower levels of the
  body's natural clot dissolvers. The study is the first to
  show these negative effects, which increase the risk of
  heart disease, in non-smokers.

  "The blood-clotting factors, not previously evaluated in
  passive smokers, have been recently found to be good
  predictors of future cardiovascular disease, such as heart
  attacks," said the report, presented yesterday to the
  European Society of Cardiology in Amsterdam. The
  researchers, cardiologists from the University of Athens
  Medical School, said that although the risk of heart
  disease was much lower for passive smokers than for
  smokers, young people were especially vulnerable to its
  effects and parents should make homes smoke-free.

  Clive Bates, director of Action on Smoking and Health,
  said: "The effect of smoking on heart disease is the great
  untold story simply because the circulation is so sensitive."