A new study warns that smoking can leave traces in your bones for centuries after death. Researchers from the University of Leicester studied human remains buried in England between 1150 and 1855.
Smoking can leave marks on your bones for centuries Photo: University of Leicester
Experts examined 323 sets of skeletons discovered in two graves in England. Following the research, it was established that some of these people smoked tobacco, according to the Daily Mail.
Included were 177 adults from the garden of St James’s Cemetery in Euston, London, dating from the 18th and 19th centuries. The remaining 146 were taken from a country churchyard in Barton-upon-Humber in Lincolnshire, and included remains of people who lived before the introduction of tobacco to Europe (1150-1500) and those who lived after (1500- 1855).
The research also took into account the date of tobacco’s arrival in Western Europe in the 16th century, an act commonly attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh in 1586. It is also believed that tobacco has been present in England since at least the 1560s.
By analyzing human bone remains, both before and after the introduction of tobacco, the researchers were able to identify “clearly” bone changes. The team identified 45 “discriminative molecular features” that differ between tobacco smokers and nonsmokers.
“Tobacco use leaves a metabolic record in human bone distinctive enough to identify its use in individuals with unknown tobacco use”, says the team of researchers in their paper, published in Science Advances.
How tobacco affects people’s health
In the study, the experts set out to learn more about these molecules and the effect they might have on modern human health.
“Our research shows that there are significant differences in the molecular characteristics contained in the bones of former tobacco users and non-tobacco users,” said lead author Dr. Sarah Inskip, a bioarchaeologist.
“This shows that we can see the impact that tobacco use has on our skeletal structure“, he says.
In general, scientists can easily tell if a deceased person, hundreds of years ago, smoked because of the stains or marks on their teeth.
However, sometimes a skeleton’s teeth detach from the rest of the body and are lost, making it more difficult to determine whether the person smoked.
Scientists have established a method by looking for molecular traces of tobacco smoke in cortical bone – the dense tissue that makes up the outer layer of bones and provides bone strength.
Overall, the study shows that tobacco use leaves a metabolic record in human cortical bone even hundreds of years after death.
“This groundbreaking research shows that archaeometabolomics has much to offer in terms of understanding past phenotypes such as tobacco smoking“, say the researchers who also claim that this “ne can help us better understand past health conditions and their relationship to current trends“.
The team wants to continue to better understand how tobacco has affected people’s health since its popularization around the world.
