Smoke-free laws can reduce heart attack hospitalizations

Atlanta, Georgia, January 2: A latest study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has revealed that implementation of smoke-free laws can eventually lead to lesser number of hospitalizations due to heart attacks.

For the research purposes, the area of Pueblo, Colorado was taken into account. The effects of smoke-free ordinances implemented here in July 2003 were studied.

The number of people hospitalized for heart attacks 18 months before the implementation of this law and three years after that was compared.

It was discovered that there was a significant drop of 41 percent in the number of hospitalizations for heart attacks, after the smoke-free laws came into effect. The number went down from 399 before implementation to 237 three years after the introduction of the law.

The study has cited many reasons for how smoke-free laws could be related to fewer heart attack-related hospitalizations.

One of the main reasons could be that with the law coming into effect, the exposure to secondhand smoke came down. Also, since people were not able to smoke in public, it might have been possible that they did not smoke at home too, leading to an even lesser secondhand exposure to smoke. Moreover, many people could have eventually quit smoking.

Though it is not clear if the volunteers in the study were smokers or non-smokers, it does add weight to the earlier eight studies which concluded that enforcement of smoke-free laws does lead to a reduction in heart attack related hospitalizations.

According to a 2006 Surgeon General report, “Exposure of adults to secondhand smoke has immediate adverse effects on the cardiovascular system and causes coronary heart disease and lung cancerdefine.”

Secondhand smoke is very dangerous and has been labeled as a cancer-causing agent by the Environmental Protection Agency. As per the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and American Cancer Society, secondhand smoke is a combination of smoke coming out from the burning tip of the cigarette, cigar or pipe, plus the smoke that is exhaled.

Further, NCI states that secondhand smoke can very easily affect a person’s heart and blood vessels. According to NCI website, “It may raise the risk of heart disease by 25 to 30 percent and cause about 46,000 heart disease deaths annually.”

The present study has been published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on Wednesday. It is coupled with an editorial elaborating the study.