Effects of tobacco smoking on the human pupil.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study, published as a clinical trial.

Determine the effects of tobacco cigarette or sham placebo-smoking on pupil diameter.

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are adults, both men and women.

Tobacco smokers abstained from smoking and all subjects abstained from caffeine-containing products for at least 8 h prior to testing.

Right pupil diameter, heart rate, systolic and diastolic blood pressure were measured before and after sham- or tobacco-smoking in each subject.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized and placebo-controlled.

The participants were allocated by chance, so the intervention group and the comparison group should start out alike.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the intervention group a baseline to be compared against.

The smokers each smoked one tobacco cigarette, and the non-smokers each inhaled air through an unlit sham cigarette.

Pupil size was measured from a colored photograph taken with a Polaroid camera equipped with a high-speed flash with the subject in a standardized, dimly lit quiet room.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Analysis of Variance, Blood Pressure, Heart Rate, Miosis, Nicotine, Pupil and Smoking.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized and placebo-controlled study.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 3 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 1999 (International journal of clinical pharmacology and therapeutics), a journal based in Germany.

More context: all human trials.