Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
How can only one cigarette harm you?
The history of how cigarettes can harm your health has crept forward at a snail’s pace for decades, despite robust research proving smoking is toxic.
Reluctance to believe the research was led, of course, by the tobacco industry, but even doctors were slow to believe it and recommended not smoking or quitting.
When I wrote a book in 1982 on how to quit it was still thought that you could get away with just cutting down. Smoking five cigs or less would leave you in good health. No longer. Now it’s none. Not even one.
How can only one ciggie a day be harmful? You’d better believe it. New research shows smoking one cigarette a day leads to a whopping increased risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) in men and women, plus an increase in the risk of stroke for both.
Just one cigarette a day has half the risk of smoking 20 a day in men and a third of the risk in women. For a stroke, one cigarette accounted for roughly one third of the risk associated with smoking 20 a day. Heart disease, not cancer, is the greatest mortality risk for smoking, causing nearly half of smoking-related premature deaths.
The substantial risk of CHD from “low” exposure to tobacco smoke first came to light in the 1990s. It was calculated there was a 30% increase in CHD risk among people who were exposed to secondhand smoke and a 39% increase in one-a-day smokers.
We know a great deal about how low levels of smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke impact on the risk of CHD – this is due to exposure to fine particulate matter in cigarette smoke of which its effects are shattering: inflammation in blood vessels, thickened blood, furred arteries and regulation disruption of the heartbeat.
In 2005, researchers reported that the effects of even brief (minutes to hours) passive smoking are often nearly as large as chronic active smoking (averaging 80% to 90%).
That said, evidence is rapidly accumulating that the cardiovascular system, arterial stiffness, oxidative stress, inflammation, heart rate variability, and increased infarct size are exquisitely sensitive to the toxins in secondhand smoke.
It seems only complete cessation is protective and that should be our goal.
As for smoke-free public places, it’s a no-brainer. Comprehensive smokefree laws in public places lead to large drops in hospital admissions for heart, stroke and lung disease.