Cigarets & Capillaries

Camel cigarets were quick to snap up a laboratory observation and advertise: ''Smoke a Camel and notice how soon you feel your natural energy snap back'' (TIME, July 2). Last March, if advertising scouts had been on the job at the New York Academy of Medicine, or last week if they had read the Journal of the American Medical Association, they could have evolved a new cigaret-selling slogan: ''Smoke a cigaret and-keep your fingers cool. . . . Cool hands mean a warm heart."

In the Manhattan laboratory of Drs. Irving Sherwood Wright and Dean Moffat who reported the latest of several studies on cigarets and capillary constriction, men and women sat bolt upright with their hands stretched over a table high as their chests. Pointed at the transparent flesh around the finger nails was a special capillary microscope. Intermittently for three-hour tests, subjects held the pose and puffed at cigarets, suspended on slender reeds before their lips. Some of the cigarets were standard brands; others were de-nicotinized; still others were mentholated. Then, too, there were rolls of shredded paper containing no tobacco at all. But no smoker could see what brand he was to puff.

Drs. Wright or Moffat would light a cigaret on a reed and tell the subject to smoke at his natural rate, while electric thermometers registered the temperatures of fingertips and the doctors studied through the microscope the behavior of blood in the nail fold capillaries. In most cases, except for shredded paper cigarets, finger temperatures dropped from 1DEG to 15DEG with each smoke. In several cases, circulation of blood ceased, briefly but entirely, in the capillaries of the nail folds.

Does blood similarly cease to flow in the capillaries of the brain when one smokes? Can this explain the light-headedness which Drs. Wright and Moffat's subjects experienced after the first cigaret of the day?

Some of the heaviest of smokers, during the experiments, occasionally grew deathly sick, at times fainted. Drs. Wright and Moffat reasoned that ordinarily those smokers took only a few puffs of a cigaret. before throwing it away, whereas in the experiments, they continued smoking until almost all the cigaret was gone. Concluded Drs. Wright and Moffat:

"At least in many individuals, habitual smoking does not result in the development of an immunity to the toxins of cigaret smoke. It would seem that experience teaches one, often subconsciously, to control one's smoking so that the effects are kept at a submanifest point. To be concrete, one does not take a puff from a cigaret if certain effects of the one preceding are manifest. Similarly, a second cigaret is not smoked until the effects of the preceding one have worn off. . . . The length of time for these effects to wear off varies greatly in different individuals and even in the same individuals at different times."

According to Researchers Wright & Moffat, the desire for "another smoke" is due to: "1) the wish for the soothing, quieting effect of the smoke, which increases with the cessation of the effects of the previous cigaret, and 2) the nervous desire to do something with one's hands."

Dr. Wright (33 years) and Dr. Moffat (27 years) are too young and diffident to draw far-reaching conclusions from their research. They say categorically:

"Although not definitely proved, the evidence seems to indicate that nicotine is at least one of the toxic factors [in cigaret smoking] and that carbon monoxide and the products of the cigaret papers may be eliminated as offending mediums." Other suspect factors: "Ammonia, pyridine and pyridine derivative, cyanides and sulpho-cyanides, arsenic."

Significance of Drs. Wright and Moffat's research is that it supplies additional evidence that smoking increases the damage to the tissues of a person whose blood circulation is impaired. Diseases which smokers must guard against include angina pectoris, thrombo-angiitis obliterans. arteriosclerosis. But, cheerfully add the researchers, they have no whit of evidence that smoking causes such diseases.

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