Translation of Evidence Core organized a workshop on assessing exposure to Secondhand Smoke (SHS) on October 7-8, 2008 at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, Baltimore, MD. The planning team included Neal Benowitz from the University of California, San Francisco Center of Excellence and Jonathan Klein from American Academy of Pediatrics Julius B. Richmond Center of Excellence. The workshop addressed the need to catalogue approaches to assessing SHS exposure with the goal of providing a set of uniform methods for use by FAMRI and other investigators.

Objectives:

• Create a resource for investigators who are seeking instruments and protocols for SHS exposure assessment
• Bring uniformity to the approaches used by FAMRI investigators so as to foster comparisons of findings across studies

An expert group was convened to review the literature on methods for assessing exposure to SHS including using questionnaire, environmental measurements, and biomarkers. The expert group included the following:

Questionnaire

• Robert McMillen (Mississippi State University)
• Michael Cummings (Roswell Park CI)
• Geoffrey Fong (U Waterloo)
• Jonathan Winickoff (Massachusetts General)
• Jonathan Klein (AAP Julius B. Richmond Center of Excellence)
• Jonathan Samet (Johns Hopkins Center of Excellence)
• Erika Avila Tang (Johns Hopkins Center of Excellence)

Environmental Measurements

• Kathie Hammond (UC Berkeley)
• Andrew Hyland (Roswell Park CI)
• James Repace (Repace Associates)
• Pat Breysse (Johns Hopkins Center of Excellence)
• Laura Gundel (Lawrence Berkeley)
• Neil Klepeis (Stanford)
• Mel Hovell (SDSU)
• Benjamin Apelberg (Johns Hopkins Center of Excellence)

Biomarkers

• Stephen Hecht (U Minnesota)
• David Ashley (CDC)
• Dana Best (Children's National Medical Center)
• Thomas Bernert (CDC)
• Wael Al-Delaimy (UCSD)
• Neil Benowitz (UCSF Center of Excellence)
• Sungroul Kim (Johns Hopkins Center of Excellence)

Three manuscripts are being prepared based on the recommendations from the measuring exposure to SHS workshop.