Another nail in smokers’ coffins

AS few as five cigarettes a day doubles the risk of smokers dying from a heart attack or stroke, a world-first Australian study of 190,000 people has found.

For the first time, Australian National University researchers found that smokers have triple the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease and double the risk of a heart attack, a stroke or heart failure compared to non-smokers.

Smokers are five times more likely to develop peripheral cardiovascular diseases such as gangrene, according to the most in-depth study in the world tracking smokers and non-smokers over seven years.

About 6000 Australians die each year from preventable smoking-related cardiovascular illnesses — 17 a day.

However, if Australia’s 2.7 million smokers quit by the age of 45, they could cut their cardiovascular risk by 90 per cent.

“It is a wake-up call,” lead researcher Emily Banks from the ANU National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, said. “Smoking causes terrible harm across the board. If a smoker has a heart attack or a stroke, it is more likely than not that it was caused by smoking”.

The internationally acclaimed findings will be used by industry and government policy makers, including Quit and the Heart Foundation.

The ANU researchers investigated “the risk of heart attack, stroke, heart failure, heart muscle disease, rhythm problems and gangrene in Australians from all walks of life — men, women, city, country, rich, poor,” Prof Banks said.

The study found smoking also caused 11,400 coronaryrelated hospital admissions a year, or 31 per day.

Heart Foundation chief executive John Kelly said the new evidence was disturbing.

“It demonstrates that our battle to eliminate the devastation tobacco brings to people’s lives is far from over,” he said. “We urge the Government to maintain tobacco control as a high priority and look forward to seeing it feature strongly in the new prevention strategy recently announced by the Minister for Health.”

The research was published in the international journal BMC Medicine and was undertaken in partnership with the Heart Foundation and Sax Institute.