{"id":32579,"date":"2012-10-30T08:54:33","date_gmt":"2012-10-30T12:54:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/?post_type=news&p=32579"},"modified":"2012-10-30T08:54:33","modified_gmt":"2012-10-30T12:54:33","slug":"the-research-agrees-smoking-is-really-bad-for-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/2012\/10\/30\/the-research-agrees-smoking-is-really-bad-for-you\/","title":{"rendered":"The Research Agrees: Smoking Is Really Bad for You"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Four new studies offer powerful evidence of the dangers of smoking and the health benefits of quitting or not being exposed to secondhand smoke.<\/p>\n

Smoking in the U.K. — <\/strong>Between 1996 amd 2001, the Million Women Study started following more than one million women aged 50 to 65 years of age. In \u00a0a report published in the Lancet<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0trial investigators, including renowned epidemiologist Richard Peto, found that\u00a012-year mortality was significantly higher in women with a history of smoking compared with women who never smoked (rate ratio 2.76, CI 2.71-2.81).\u00a0Smokers, the authors calculated, lose 10 years of life. The good news is that stopping smoking before the age of 40 reduces the excess mortality by 90%.<\/p>\n

Smoking in Japan —\u00a0<\/strong>The Life Span Study, published in BMJ<\/em><\/a>, was started in 1950 and has followed more than 65,000 men and women in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The results were consistent with the Million Women Study in the U.K.: the rate ratio for mortality was more than doubled for smokers compared with nonsmokers both for men (2.21, CI 1.97-2.48) and for women (2.61, CI 1.98-3.44). The investigators also reported that stopping smoking before age 35 eliminated almost all of the risk associated with smoking.<\/p>\n

Smoke-free legislation meta-analysis —<\/strong> Smoking is not just a personal\u00a0decision that has individual health effects. A new meta-analysis published in\u00a0Circulation<\/em><\/a> found that smoke-free legislation results in immediate reductions in hospital admissions or deaths for coronary events (RR 0.848, CI 0.816-0.881), other heart disease (RR 0.610, CI 0.440-0.847), cerebrovascular accidents (RR 0.840, CI 0.753-0.936), and respiratory disease (RR 0.760, CI 0.682-0.846). The authors, Crystal Tan and Stanton Glatz, also report that the biggest reductions in events were associated with the most stringent smoke-free laws.<\/p>\n

Smoke-free legislation in Minnesota —\u00a0<\/strong>Here’s one more study to lend support to the above meta-analysis. In a paper published in the Archives of Internal Medicine,<\/em><\/a> Richard Hurt and colleagues analyzed data before and after the implementation of a smoke-free law in Olmsted County, Minnesota. They found a significant, 33% reduction in\u00a0the incidence of MI (from 150.8 to 100.7 per 100,000 people) and a trend in the reduction of sudden cardiac death by 17% (from 109.1 to 92.0 per 100,000 people). In an accompanying commentary<\/a>, Sara Kalkhoran and Pamela Ling write that as “the evidence base documenting the positive health outcomes” of smoke-free legislation grows, “we should prioritize the enforcement of smoke-free policies, eliminating loopholes in existing policies as well as encouraging expansion of smoke-free policies to include multiunit housing, motor vehicles, casinos, and outdoor locations. Exposure to SHS [secondhand smoke] should not be a condition of employment, and all workers, including those of lower income and those in the service and hospitality industries, should have equal protection from SHS exposure.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Four new studies offer powerful evidence of the dangers of smoking and the health benefits of quitting or not being exposed to secondhand smoke. Smoking in the U.K. — Between 1996 amd 2001, the Million Women Study started following more than one million women aged 50 to 65 years of age. In \u00a0a report published […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":196,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[811,402,1540],"class_list":["post-32579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prevention","tag-smoke-free-laws","tag-smoking","tag-tobacco"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/196"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32579\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}