Five years after having definitively quit smoking, a former tobacco user sees his cardiovascular risks decrease by an average of 39%, according to a new study. And this, whatever his age.
It is well known that smoking is very bad for your health. At the cardiovascular level, this can lead to increased blood pressure, accelerated heart rate and deterioration of the arteries. It also increases the risk of heart attack, atherosclerosis and stroke. In France, 25% of smoking-related deaths are cardiovascular (more than 30% among women). However, if you are serious about quitting smoking, all is not lost.
Indeed, according to an American study published on August 20 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Jama), in people who permanently quit smoking, the cardiovascular benefits are felt as early as five years after weaning. From there, the risk drops on average by 39% and becomes almost equivalent to that of people who have stopped smoking for 10 or 15 years, regardless of age.
To arrive at these happy results, researchers from Vanderbilt University in Nashville and the Boston School of Public Health analyzed data from the Framingham Heart Study, conducted on 8,770 people from 1954 to 2015. “provides particularly reliable data on lifetime smoking history,” the researchers note. “Our team took advantage of this unique opportunity to document what happens to cardiovascular disease risk after quitting compared to people who continued to smoke and those who never smoked,” says lead author Meredith Duncan. of the study.
A risk still higher than among those who have never smoked
The researchers were thus able to study the effects of quitting smoking on the risk of myocardial infarction, stroke, death from cardiovascular disease and heart failure in those who smoked more than 20 packs a year ( 2,371 people in total).
But if quitting smoking permanently is very beneficial to the body, there is no magic: the cardiovascular risk remains slightly higher among former cigarette smokers than among others.
“The cardiovascular system begins to heal relatively quickly after quitting, even in people who have been heavy smokers for decades,” comments Hilary Tindle, medical director of the VUMC Tobacco Treatment Service and founding director of the Vanderbilt Center for Tobacco Addiction and Lifestyle ( Vital). “Full recovery could take years, so now is a good time to quit smoking and take other heart-healthy steps,” she encourages.
75,320 deaths attributable to tobacco in France in 2015
In addition to cardiovascular diseases, the harmful impacts of tobacco on health are very broad. Smoking is the cause of 16 cancers (especially lung cancer) or one third of all cancer cases. It causes 21 chronic diseases, including asthma, diabetes and erectile dysfunction, to name the most well-known. Smokers are also more likely to develop or worsen psychological problems such as anxiety, depression or nervousness. Finally, tobacco causes the skin to age prematurely and, in addition to reducing the quality of life (sleep disorders, difficult physical exertion), it reduces life expectancy by ten years.
In metropolitan France, in 2015, “75,320 deaths were estimated to be attributable to smoking out of the 580,000 recorded deaths”, announced Public Health France at the end of May. Of these deaths, 61.7% are due to cancer, 22.1% to cardiovascular disease and 16.2% to respiratory disease (16.2%).
“As in most industrialized countries, smoking remains the leading cause of preventable death in France,” noted the organization. But all is not so bleak since according to the Ministry of Health, since 2016, the number of daily tobacco users has fallen by 1.6 million in France, including 600,000 in the first half of 2018.
.