According to Dr Ali Ahmed, of the Washington Center for Health and Aging (United States), former smokers who crushed their last cigarette 15 years ago can breathe: at the end of these fifteen years of abstinence from smoking, their risk of heart failure and death would have become the same as that of a non-smoker.
However, heavy smokers, that is to say those who have smoked at least one pack a day for 32 years, do not benefit from this remission. For them, the risk of heart failure remains just as high, even 15 years after quitting smoking.
For this study, Dr Ahmed and his team followed a cohort of smokers over 65 including 2,556 people who had never smoked, 629 current or recent smokers, and 1,297 people who had quit smoking in the past. less 15 years earlier.
“When you smoke, it causes atherosclerosis, that is, the buildup of plaque in the arteries, which narrows them and increases the risk of a blood clot or heart attack,” explains the doctor. “However, when you stop smoking, the accumulation of plaque (therefore the risk of blood clots) decreases, which allows the cardiovascular risk to return to normal over time”.
Cardiovascular diseases and respiratory diseases are two other major causes of anticipated death attributable to tobacco, killing 20,000 and 11,000 respectively in France in 2010. But neither should neglect cancer which caused 47,000 of the 78,000 tobacco-related deaths that same year.
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