smoking even a few cigarettes a day appear to stunt the growth of teenagers' lungs, a Harvard university study has found. Gold and colleagues from Harvard's school of public health based their findings on 5,158 boys and 4,902 girls between the ages of 10 and 18-a third of whom had smoked - who were examined annually between 1974 and 1989. The results were published by the new England journal of medicine .
The study found that girls who smoked five or more cigarettes A day had a one percent slower than usual growth each year of their force expiratory volume. Thisbis the amount of air that canvbe blow out of the lungs in one second , and it is an important measure of lung health