Heart attack risk ‘with one cig per day’

JUST one cigarette a day carries nearly half the risk for heart attack and stroke as smoking a full pack of 20, according to a large-scale study published yesterday.

“If someone smokes one cigarette instead of 20 per day, intuitively we’d think that the risk drops to 1/20, or 5 percent,” said lead author Allan Hackshaw, a professor at University College London, whose paper analysed 141 previous studies. “This seems to be the case for lung cancer, but is not true for heart attacks and stroke, where one cigarette per day carries around 50 percent of the risk of a pack a day.”

The findings were published in the medical journal

A team of scientists led by Hackshaw analysed the results of 141 studies, estimating the risk of one, five or 20 cigarettes a day.

They found that men who lit up once a day had 46 percent of the excess risk of heart disease associated with smoking a full pack a day, much higher than expected. For strokes, the excess risk was 41 percent. For reasons that are not fully understood, the risk for women was somewhat smaller – 31 and 34 percent, respectively.

Long-term smoking shortens life expectancy by 12-15 years.

“This well-conducted study confirms what epidemiologists have suspected but few among the public have,” commented University of Oxford professor Paul Aveyard, who was not involved in the research. “The implication is obvious – anyone who smokes should stop.”