You don’t have to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day to have health problems. Just one cigarette a day is dangerous for the heart and arteries. There is therefore no safe level of smoking for cardiovascular disease.
If you think smoking fewer than 6 cigarettes a day, or even just one cigarette a day, is safe, you’re wrong! From the moment you smoke, even a little, the cardiovascular risk increases. From the first cigarette, we are already exposed to half the risk of smoking associated with smoking 20 cigarettes a day and this had been well demonstrated by an analysis published by the BMJ. The risk associated with one cigarette per day would be equivalent to nearly 50% of the risk associated with smoking one pack per day in men and a third in women.
This finding has important implications for many smokers and health professionals who believe that smoking just a few cigarettes a day is less harmful than smoking a pack. Smokers should quit smoking altogether rather than just trying to reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease. For the heart, reducing its consumption is useless: you have to quit smoking!
Different risks in the short and long term
Even in the occasional smoker or “light smoker”, cigarettes damage the heart and the arteries. The dangers of cigarettes are present in the short and long term.
In the short term, smoking can cause spasms of the arteries, that is to say a sudden narrowing of these, the appearance of heart rhythm disorders and especially the formation of clots. A single cigarette makes the platelets hyper-excitable with a risk of aggregation of these platelets between them and clot (thrombus). It is this phenomenon that is at the origin myocardial infarction, stroke or sudden death in young adults. No need for atherosclerotic plaque at this stage to cause an accident.
In the long term, it is the progressive degradation of the walls of the arteries and the appearance of plaques leading to the reduction of the internal caliber of the arteries (atherosclerosis) which threatens the smoker. When it is exposed to other risk factors such as excess cholesterol, diabetes or arterial hypertension, this atherosclerosis can be increased and it will affect all the arteries.
Support smokers
It is essential to help smokers who wish to quit and above all not to make them feel guilty, even if they have already failed during one or more previous attempts. Getting out of a 20-year-old addiction is difficult, it’s not just a problem of willpower, it takes kindness and above all help. Several methods have shown their true effectiveness: patches, inhalers, weaning medication or hypnosis. In general, when smokers relapse early, it is because the dose of nicotine provided by the substitutes is not sufficient.
Every day, 200 people die from tobacco. Smoking is the leading cause of death in France, causing 73,000 deaths each year. In addition to cardiovascular risks, tobacco can cause cancer of the lung, throat, mouth, pancreas, bladder… It is also responsible for erectile dysfunction, fertility and can aggravate certain diseases such as gastritis, ulcers, ENT infections…
Less than 6 cigarettes, it’s possibly for the lung
When it comes to tobacco, there is great variability in individual susceptibility, due to genetics and associated risk factors. For the risk of chronic bronchitis or lung cancer, a linear relationship between cigarette consumption and risk is objectified: it has been shown that smoking less than 6 cigarettes per day would be significantly less toxic to the bronchi.
The same is not true for the heart, where several studies conducted on individual data have shown that smoking only one to five cigarettes a day is associated with a very high risk of cardiovascular disease (heart attack and stroke). There is no proportionality. It’s all or nothing.
The positive point is that at an early stage, and even after a heart attack, there are no stenosing plaques, it is the clot of platelets that is responsible: after 5 days, maximum 15, the risk has returned to zero and we have not damaged his arteries. The profit is then almost 100%!
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