FRIDAY, Dec. 19, 2003 (HealthDayNews) -- You have heart disease and chest pain -- a heart attack waiting to happen. Quitting smoking is the least of your worries, right?
Think again. Heart disease patients who quit smoking can reduce their risk of premature death by about 36 percent, regardless the severity of their illness or their age, says a new study by British researchers.
"It seems that it's always worth quitting," says study leader Julia Critchley, an epidemiologist at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in England. The only time it's ever too late is, well, when it's too late.
Critchley and a colleague, Simon Capewell of the University of Liverpool, reviewed 20 previous studies of smoking cessation among heart patients. Of those, six were considered "higher quality," being relatively free of errors in methodology and other potential hitches that might skew the results.
The 20 studies included more than 12,000 people, of whom nearly 5,700 were smokers. Taken together, they showed that people who stopped smoking reduced their risk of death by 36 percent compared with those who continued lighting up. The so-called "relative risk" of suffering non-deadly heart attacks was also lower, by 32 percent, in the groups that quit smoking. Follow-up periods in the studies ranged from two years to 26 years. However, the risk of death didn't fall with time, suggesting that most of the drop in risk associated with quitting smoking occurs within two years or so of cessation.
A report on the new study appears in the latest issue of the Cochrane Library, an international medical publication.
Dr. Richard Stein, a cardiologist at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City and a spokesman for the American Heart Association, says people who quit smoking often take up other heart-friendly behaviors, too. They're more likely to exercise, use medications to lower their cholesterol and blood pressure, and eat a low-fat diet high in fruits and vegetables. As a result, it's often difficult for researchers to tease out the precise impact of smoking cessation on reducing the risk of future heart problems.
Still, Stein adds, the latest study sounds "reasonable" given what researchers have found previously. The link, he says, is probably related to the way tobacco smoke exacerbates trouble spots, or plaques, in narrowed blood vessels. Smoking damages the cells that line vessel walls. When these cells are the only thing keeping a "vulnerable" plaque from breaking loose into the bloodstream, the added weakening can be devastating.
When people stop smoking, they snuff out a major source of instability for their vulnerable plaques -- and thus avoid future heart attacks and strokes, Stein says.
If you do quit smoking, ask for a raise. Michigan researchers have found that employees who quit smoking save their company money by boosting their productivity and reducing their medical expenses. However, the expenses for workers with chronic ailments such as arthritis, back pain or allergies take twice as long -- 10 years versus five -- to reach the level of employees who never smoked. That study appears in the latest issue of the American Journal of Health Promotion.
More information
For more on the harmful effects of tobacco use, check out the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the American Lung Association.
