Smoking causes and contributes to a large number of human diseases, yet due to the large number of potentially hazardous compounds in cigarette smoke -- almost 5,000 chemicals have been identified, establishing the link between smoking and disease has often proved difficult.
This unbiased and scientifically accurate overview of current knowledge begins with an overview of the chemical constituents in cigarette smoke, their fate in the human body, and their documented toxic effects on various cells and tissues. Recent results detailing the many ways components of cigarette smoke adversely affect human health are also presented, highlighting the role of smoking in cardiovascular, respiratory, infectious and other diseases. A final chapter discusses current strategies for the treatment and prevention of smoking-induced illness.
Despite the obvious importance of the topic, this is the first comprehensive reference on tobacco smoke toxicity, making for essential reading for all toxicologists and healthcare professionals dealing with smoking-related diseases.

David Bernhard gained his PhD degree in microbiology at the University of Innsbruck, Faculty of Medicine, and the Tyrolean Cancer Research Institute, Austria. After a scientific stay abroad he served as a postdoc at the Institute of Biomedical Aging Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, by which time he was already focusing on the effects of cigarette smole on the cardiovascular system. Following another postdoc period at the Institute for Pathophysiology of the Medical University in Innsbruck, he became head of the university's cardiac surgery research laboratory, and expanded his research towards a more application-oriented field. Currently Dr. Bernhard is head of the cardiac surgery research laboratory at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria, where his major fields of interest are the pathophysiological understanding of smoking and metal ion-induced atherosclerosis, as well as the search for natural compounds in the treatment of cardiovascular dieseases, while he has recently started work on tissue engineering projects in the cardiovascular setting.