Researchers have discovered a strong link between passive smoking and chronic kidney disease (CKD).
The team investigated how passive smoking or secondhand smoking impact's people in this way by studying the patterns of 131,196 never-smokers who were part of the Korean Genome and Epidemiology Study between 2001 and 2014.
For the study, participants were put into three groups depending on how often they were exposed to passive smoke. No-exposure, less than three days per week of exposure and three or more days per week of exposure were the three categories than participantswere placed in.
Those who were exposed to this kind of smoke more than three days a week had a significantly high risk of developing chronic kidney disease.
"Secondhand smoke exposure at home or in the workplace is still prevalent despite legislative actions prohibiting public smoking," lead author of the study Jung Tak Park told a news portal. Adding, "This exposure was found to be clearly related with CKD, even with less-frequent amounts of second-hand smoke exposure."
The second leading cause of heart disease is smoking tobacco, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). Tobacco abuse and second-hand smoking reportedly cause close to 12 per cent of heart disease deaths across the globe.
The study's findings were originally published in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
