Posted on 03/30/2008 5:04:35 AM PDT by jsh3180
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Young people who continue to smoke after a heart attack are three times more likely to have future heart problems than survivors who kick the habit, Greek researchers said on Saturday.
People who are 35 or younger who keep smoking are far more prone to die from a heart-related event, have a repeat heart attack or need future treatments to clear blocked arteries compared to those who stopped smoking.
The study makes clear that smoking not only promotes a first heart attack, but poses heart risks in younger patients who have survived one, researchers said. The report was presented at the American College of Cardiology meeting in Chicago.
"Patients who have suffered a heart attack very early in life can significantly improve their long-term prognosis by quitting smoking," Dr. Loukianos Rallidis of the University General Hospital Attikon in Greece said in statement.
Rallidis and colleagues studied nearly 150 patients in Greece who had suffered a heart attack before the age of 36 and followed them for 10 years.
"More than 50 percent of these young patients continued to smoke after the first heart attack. Almost 50 percent of these patients had a second cardiac event," Rallidis told a media briefing. "Only 18 percent who stopped smoking had a second event."
Rallidis found in a previous study that 95 percent of Greek patients who had a heart attack before age 36 were smokers.
"I think this is an example of kerosene on a forest fire," said Dr. Janet Wright, a cardiologist from Chico, California, who moderated a news conference.
"If they don't do something it is like scuffing up their arteries and promoting a second heart attack," she said.
Heart disease is the No. 1 killer of men and women in the United States and in most industrialized countries. Smoking is the main cause of heart disease.
Wha??? Sorry, pal. Better begin to understand — smoking puts particles into your blood stream that do create rough patches on (scuff up) the inside walls of your arteries. These scuffs help fat & cholesterol stick to, and build up on the artery walls. It’s like when they tell you to scuff up a surface so paint will stick. It’s that simple.
I’d go into the need for muscles like the heart to have oxygen, but I don’t want to dilute the message of the paragraph above. In fact, read that paragraph again. Thanks.
The health nut American congress is in control of Greece.
from this i assume you are a smoker ?? of course you could get lung cancer or COPD just a thought
If you’re 35 or younger and having heart attacks, there’s a lot more wrong than smoking tobacco, bucko.
My understanding is that it is NOT the smoke but the nicotine so Snuff and Chewing tobacco had the same effect
It looked to me like a sarcastic comment on the idea of needing to spend yet more money on yet another study to show that SMOKING IS BAD FOR YOU. Is there ANYONE who doesn’t know this yet?
BTW, I quit last fall due to Chantix. Even after getting off the drugs, and TRYING to start again, I can’t. If there’s anybody you’re trying to get to quit, get them on those pills. I didn’t have nightmares, just very weird dreams.
If you’re 35 or younger and having heart attacks, there’s a lot more wrong than smoking tobacco, bucko...
...agreed...more than likely a male member of the family also suffered from CAD...my father, who is still living, suffered an MI at the age of 47, and smoked heavily prior to it, though he quit immediately after...I, never having smoked, running and bicycling prodigiously, was informed some years ago that I would run into heart related problems and, voila, at age 58 I suffered anginal pain from a completely blocked posterolateral artery and had to be stented...and I have two other 50% plus blockages in my right coronary arteries which no doubt will become problems...heredity is the key to the whole thing...
I had a neighbor when I was a kid, Franz Thomas. He didn’t light his cigars very often. But he always had one in his mouth, chewing on it. He died of lip and tongue cancer, well that is how his fatal cancer started. When I remember him I can still see him with that cigar in his mouth.
Bingo! It's the genes in those jeans that count. My father came from a family of long livers as did my mother. Mom died fairly young (54) of cancer, but her eight brothers and sisters all made it well into their eighties. Pa made it to 95 (died in '02), smoking drinking and eating meat three times a day. One of his brothers died of cancer in his late sixties, but the rest are all in their nineties now.
My neighbor lit one cigarette after another, take a drag and throw it on the ground and stamp it out and then light another one and do the same.
He finally died of cancer of the shoe.
“”It looked to me like a sarcastic comment on the idea of needing to spend yet more money on yet another study to show that SMOKING IS BAD FOR YOU. Is there ANYONE who doesn’t know this yet?””
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Thank you for clarifying my position. I thought it was obvious enough that I did not need to use the “sarc” tag with it.
Wow, think of that, men and women die. To read these types of reports you would think no one died unless they smoked. We will all die sooner or later, if people choose to smoke that is their business(Please no one need bother telling me the same old tired crap about health costs etc. It is tyranny, plain and simple, to tell people what they can smoke, drink or eat, regardless of the harm said smoking drinking or eating causes these individuals)and none of the governments.
If heart disease is eliminated totally then something else will be the "number one killer". I will tell you the real number one killer of all life forms on the planet earth and that is being born, dying is part of the life cycle, sure as you are born you are going to die from something and if you live to be 80 or 120 you are still going to die.
All this crap about cigarettes, drugs, alcohol and other substances people use is just that, crap, designed to scare the sh** out of you so you can be controlled. In order to pass any onerous law all one has to do is say "it will stop A:cigarettes B:Drugs C: booze.", throw in any of those three and a pass of a bill is almost guaranteed.
Before some idiot, and they are idiots, gives me a lecture on the harm these things can do to a person, let me say that I am well aware that these can, and do, harm a person. What I am saying is that it is the right, God given as free will,of any person to smoke, drink, swallow or inject any substance a person wishes into their bodies, and it is no ones business but the person using said substances.
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