There are many Benefits to Quiting Smoking. Cutting out just five cigarettes a day after an acute MI was associated with an 18% decrease in mortality, researchers found.
And quitting completely was associated with a 37% decrease compared with persistent smoking in a prospective population-based cohort study, according to Yariv Gerber, PhD, of Tel Aviv University in Israel, and colleagues.
Benefits to Quiting Smoking – Just Cut Down Even
Smokers who quit before they had an MI had a reduced mortality risk of 50%, they reported in the Dec. 15/22 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
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The study “tells us again that the blue cloud of smoke, if we can’t get rid of it, hangs over your mortality if you’re a smoker, and doing anything to cut back on cigarettes or stopping improves long-term outcome after a heart attack,” said ACC president Alfred Bove, MD, PhD, at a press conference here at which the results were presented.
Press Conference
Although the benefits of kicking the habit are well known, little is known about whether reductions in smoking have an impact on mortality among patients who have already had an MI.
So the researchers set out to evaluate long-term survival in MI patients, comparing those who never smoked, those who had quit before their heart attack, those who quit afterward, and those who kept smoking. They also wanted to assess whether cutting down on the number of cigarettes smoked made a difference.
They tracked the smoking habits and health status of 1,521 patients who were younger than 65. Participants were interviewed about their smoking at baseline and four times over the course of a median follow-up of 13.2 years, during which 427 deaths occurred.
Quitting smoking had an impact on AMI patients that was comparable to having normal blood pressure or being nondiabetic. The same held true for undergoing percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty .
Even reducing smoking by just five cigarettes a day proved significant. Benefits to Quiting Smoking are based on just cutting down even.
“The take-home message is: not smoking is best, quitting is great, and if you can’t quit, reduce the number because it does actually have a significant impact on your risk of death,” comment Janet Wright, MD, executive vice president of science and quality for the ACC, who presented the study at the press conference on behalf of the investigators.
Just cutting down leads to lots of Benefits to Quiting Smoking.