Scientists have found case when Smoking was healthy
MOSCOW, February 17 — RIA Novosti. Smoking was paradoxically beneficial to the health of the inhabitants of Germany due to the fact that carbon monoxide in tobacco smoke helped him to suppress the anemia, according to a paper published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.
“This man could never be an athlete, since his blood is just not able to carry large quantities of oxygen, but Smoking saves him from developing anemia. There is another additional plus is that the carriers of such mutations are unusually resistant to poisoning by carbon monoxide,” said John Olson (John Olson) of Rician University in Houston (USA).
As said Olson, the story of this discovery begins with the treatment of a young girl in the clinic of the German city of Mannheim, complained of General weakness and persistent problems with a low concentration of hemoglobin in the blood.
Studying her DNA, scientists discovered in the HBA1 gene, which contains instructions for the Assembly of the hemoglobin molecule are very rare and unusual mutation in which the protein structure has changed only one amino acid — a molecule of histidine has been replaced with leucine.
Replacement of the 58th amino acid in hemoglobin, according to biologists, has led to the fact that the protein has become extremely vulnerable to the action of oxygen. The centre of the protein when in contact with oxygen molecules apart, causing the hemoglobin loses its normal ability to carry oxygen.
This discovery surprised scientists, because such mutations usually transmitted by heredity from parents to children, and the parents of this girl who migrated to Germany from Turkey decades ago, has never complained of anemia and anemia. However, when the researchers analyzed their DNA samples, the mutation is still found in the genome of the girl’s father.
Why he did not suffer from anaemia? The reason for this was extremely simple — man a lot and very often smoked, defended his hemoglobin from destruction.
The fact that the same mutation that makes the hemoglobin almost 85 thousand times more sensitive to another molecule contained in large amounts in tobacco smoke — carbon monoxide gas. Carbon monoxide for ordinary people is a poison because it binds with hemoglobin much stronger than oxygen, and actually stifles people from the inside.
For people like the man from Turkey and his daughter, carbon monoxide is a drug, not a poison — it stabilizes the hemoglobin and allows it to at least partially fulfill their function and not fall apart upon contact with oxygen. For this reason, Smoking was beneficial to health of the father, and he did not even know about the presence of a rare mutation in his DNA, and his Smoking daughter experienced all the consequences of its existence.
Do I need to smoke to others who suffer from similar issues? As scientists believe, to do it not necessarily — you can instead take large doses of antioxidants that protect the hemoglobin in a similar way. On the other hand, as acknowledged by the researchers, secondary Smoking would harm such people is much smaller than the rest of the inhabitants of the planet.