Passive Smoke Boosts Heart Attacks Study: Bystanders Have Nearly Double The Risk Of Heart Disease
High exposure to secondhand smoke nearly doubles a woman’s risk of having a heart attack, according to the largest study ever conducted on the issue.
The 10-year Harvard study tracked more than 32,000 healthy nurses who never smoked. Many earlier studies have linked secondhand smoke to heart disease, but the new findings show the biggest increase in risk ever reported, and the researchers say that it applies equally to men and women.
The women in the study, who ranged from 36 to 61 when the study began, suffered 152 heart attacks, 25 of them fatal. The results mean that “there may be up to 50,000 Americans dying of heart attacks from passive smoking each year,” said Dr. Ichiro Kawachi, the lead author of the study, which was published in the journal Circulation.
By contrast, lung cancer deaths from passive smoking are estimated at 3,000 to 4,000 a year.
The data being reported on today are from the Nurses’ Health Study, a project that began in 1976 with 121,700 female nurses filling out detailed surveys every two years about their health and habits. To measure the effects of passive smoking, the researchers asked the women in 1982 about their exposure, and then monitored new cases of heart disease for the next decade.
The analysis did not include all the study participants, but only the 32,046 who had never smoked and who at the outset did not have heart disease or cancer.
The women who reported being exposed regularly to cigarette smoke at home or work had a 91 percent higher risk of heart attack than those with no exposure.
Even though the women worked in hospitals, some were exposed to smoke on the job because at the time of the study many hospitals allowed smoking in certain areas.
The study was set up to make sure that other risk factors like diabetes and high blood pressure did not account for the difference between the two groups.
Once the exposure ceases, the damage may quickly heal.
“In active smokers, the risk of heart disease drops immediately,” half of the way to that of a nonsmoker within a year, Glantz said.
“It never gets quite back to the nonsmoker’s level, but it comes close,” he said.
“One would expect the same to be true for passive smoking.”
xxxx 50,000 KILLED A YEAR? The results mean that “there may be up to 50,000 Americans dying of heart attacks from passive smoking each year,” said Dr. Ichiro Kawachi, the lead author of the study.