Tobacco is harmful to health, causing cardiovascular disease in particular. People who started smoking young have a threefold risk of dying early from heart or vascular disease. However, the earlier you quit smoking, especially before the age of 40, the more your risk of developing cardiovascular disease decreases or even disappears.
Quitting smoking before age 40 reduces your risk by 90%
In the Journal of the American Heart Association, a new study was published. As Blake Thomson, senior author and fellow at the George Institute for Global Health in England, explains, “The age at which a person begins to smoke is an important and often overlooked factor, and those who start smoking at a young age are at particularly high risk of dying prematurely from cardiovascular disease ”. The researchers analyzed data collected between 1997 and 2014 on nearly 400,000 American adults, of whom 58% are non-smokers, 23% are former smokers and 19% are people who smoke. Among the latter, 2% started smoking before the age of 10 and 19% between 10 and 14 years. Nearly 4,500 people have died before the age of 75 from a myocardial infarction or stroke. In addition, one observation has been established: people who quit smoking before the age of 40 reduced their “extra risks” of premature death linked to cardiovascular disease by around 90%. Also, the results show that the younger you quit smoking, the lower the risk, which can lead to the same risks as for non-smokers.
Smoking-related hospitalizations and cardiovascular diseases
For World No Tobacco Day, Public Health France has published its epidemiological bulletin. In 2015, in France, around 250,000 hospitalizations that took place for cardiovascular disease were linked to smoking. This number represents 21% of hospital stays. The researchers drew a conclusion: “a 10% reduction in the number of smokers would prevent 6,000 of these stays each year and, if only 20% of the French population had smoked, 26,000 stays would have been avoided”. In addition, the study also found that smokers who quit smoking between the ages of 15 and 34 had roughly the same “increased risk” of death from heart disease or stroke as people. who have never smoked. For the American Heart Association team, acting upstream to prevent young people from starting to smoke becomes an urgent priority, as well as the development of more effective methods to help quit smoking.
