Thinking of quitting smoking? Today's the day
Quitting smoking is famously hard. However, according to recent findings, the sooner one stops, the better. Perhaps today is the day?
Smoking tobacco, as most of us are well aware, increases the risk of a wide range of serious health issues.
Associated conditions include heart disease, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and several types of cancer.
Despite many of these dangers being common knowledge, giving up tobacco is challenging in the extreme.
That said, cigarette smoking is on the decline in the United States.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of people who currently smoke in the U.S. has dropped from 20.9 percent of the adult population in 2005 to 15.5 percent in 2016.
The fact that so many people are giving up also means that there are now millions of people who used to smoke.
Former smokers investigated
Already, some researchers have attempted to find out how the disease risk of people who used to smoke changes after they quit.
Earlier studies concluded that cardiovascular risk drops just a few years after quitting. However, most early studies were based on relatively small numbers of participants and there was often little follow-up to check smoking status over time.
Now, thanks to a large new subset of people who used to smoke, it is possible to get a better understanding of how quickly (or slowly) cardiovascular health returns to normal. And, because more people used to smoke, it is important to understand how their health might change over time.
To investigate, researchers took data from the Framingham Heart Study. They had access to the health information of 8,700 people, none of whom had any signs of cardiovascular disease at the start of the study.
The scientists followed each participant for an average of 27 years. During this time, there were 2,386 cardiovascular events.
They compared the cardiovascular health of people who currently smoke, those who used to smoke, and people who have never smoked.
There are a wide range of factors that can impact an individual's cardiovascular health. With this in mind, the researchers controlled the analysis for as many of these variables as possible, including education level, sex, age, decade of birth, diabetes, hypertension, cholesterol levels, alcohol use, and body mass index (BMI).
