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American Journal of Epidemiology Advance Access originally published online on March 18, 2009
American Journal of Epidemiology 2009 169(9):1113-1123; doi:10.1093/aje/kwp021
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American Journal of Epidemiology © The Author 2009. Published by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

ORIGINAL CONTRIBUTIONS

Is House-Dust Nicotine a Good Surrogate for Household Smoking?

Todd Whitehead, Catherine Metayer, Mary H. Ward, Marcia G. Nishioka, Robert Gunier, Joanne S. Colt, Peggy Reynolds, Steve Selvin, Patricia Buffler and Stephen M. Rappaport

Correspondence to Todd Whitehead, School of Public Health, University of California, 50 University Hall, MC 7360, Berkeley, CA 94720 (e-mail: toddpwhitehead{at}berkeley.edu).

Received for publication August 13, 2008. Accepted for publication January 15, 2009.

The literature is inconsistent regarding associations between parental smoking and childhood leukemia, possibly because previous studies used self-reported smoking habits as surrogates for children's true exposures to cigarette smoke. Here, the authors investigated the use of nicotine concentrations in house dust as measures of children's exposure to cigarette smoke in 469 households from the Northern California Childhood Leukemia Study (1999–2007). House dust was collected by using high-volume surface samplers and household vacuum cleaners and was analyzed for nicotine via gas chromatography–mass spectrometry. Using multivariable linear regression, the authors evaluated the effects of self-reported parental smoking, parental demographics, house characteristics, and other covariates on house-dust nicotine concentrations. They observed that nicotine concentrations in house dust were associated with self-reported smoking for periods of months and years before dust collection. Furthermore, the authors found that the relation between nicotine dust levels and self-reported smoking varied by parental age and socioeconomic status. These findings suggest that house-dust nicotine concentrations reflect long-term exposures to cigarette smoke in the home and that they may be less biased surrogates for children's exposures to cigarette smoke than self-reported smoking habits.

child; dust; environmental exposure; infant; leukemia; linear models; nicotine; smoking

Abbreviations: HVS3, high-volume surface sampler; KW ANOVA, Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance; NCCLS, Northern California Childhood Leukemia Study; SES, socioeconomic status


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