Passive smoking has been blamed by medical experts for the deaths of more than half-a-million around the world and soon enough a big number of the fatalities could include individuals who were inadvertently exposed to second-hand smoke their parents when they were young.

An analysis issued this week by the Menzies Research Institute Tasmania (MRIT) yielded results that indicated children who regularly inhaled the second-hand smoke coming from their unsuspecting parents were likely to suffer brain or heart attacks in their adult life.

MRIT's conclusion was based on the data collected from a separate Aussie and Finnish studies that were started two decades ago, the ABC reported on Wednesday.

The findings also supported an earlier declaration by the World Health Organisation (WHO), which said that four out of 10 children around the world were regularly subjected to possible health risks by their cigarette smoking parents.

In a statement, MRIT spokeswoman Seana Gall said that long-term observations of children who participated in the global studies pointed to an alarming "strong link between passive smoking and the risk of having a heart attack or a stroke."

The findings were established as governments from developed economies have been ramping up their efforts to stem the spread of cigarette smoking by imposing strict regulatory measures such as banning of smoking in public.

Governments have also slapped tobacco products with higher duties in order to drive up their retail prices in hopes that the high price will discourage smokers from lighting up a stick and to prevent prospective smokers from picking the habit.

While the industry delivers billions of dollars to government treasuries, the ensuing high cost of health services resulting from diseases connected by health experts to tobacco products pretty much offset the huge revenues.

In Australia, the high incidence of lung cancers, heart ailments and debilitating strokes have been attributed by the federal government to tobacco products that targeted both the nation's adult and teenage smokers.

It has recently passed a legislation that would require tobacco firms in Australia to sell their products in plain packaging, which the government said would likely reduce the number of smokers in the country in the years ahead.

For now, Dr Gall is hoping that smoking parents would realise the harmful but invisible effects of passive smoke to their kids, which should convince them to get as far as possible from their children during their tobacco indulging moments, that is if they cannot kick the habit at this time.

As shown by MRIT's analysis, "chemicals in cigarette smoke interact with the lining of the blood vessels and that seems to be causing an inability of them to expand and contract properly," Dr Gall warned.

This was supported by ultrasound tests on the young participants, which showed that blood vessels on their arms have incurred irreversible cardiovascular damages.

These effects will be manifested later on as the children advance on their age and the elastic capability of their arteries feel the deterioration of an ageing body plus the earlier impacts of second-hand smoke, leaving them vulnerable to strokes to hearts attacks.

"As these people in our studies get older, we will look at whether there are other cardiovascular events as a result of this exposure to parental smoking," Dr Gall said.

She looks forward for succeeding research works to help medical experts plot a predictive pattern that would aid them in ascertaining whether kids who were at the receiving end of passive smokes would indeed suffer the health irregularities cited in the new study.