By Robert Preidt
HealthDay Reporter
Thursday, January. 25 (January 25, 2018) (HealthDay News) If you think that smoking just one cigarette per day will not cause harm, you’re not.
British researchers found that lighting up only once per day is linked to a significantly greater risk of stroke and heart disease than would be expected.
The bottom line is “No safe amount of smoking is available for heart illness,” wrote the team headed by Allan Hacksaw, of UCL Cancer Institute located at University College, London.
“Smokers must quit rather than absorptive, by using methods of cessation if necessary to greatly reduce the risk of being a victim,” the study authors stated.
It’s also a reminder for young people to be aware that the so-called “light” smoking comes with the cost of a heavy burden, one expert told.
Young adults “often smoke less than older people,” noted Patricia Folan who is the director of the Center for Tobacco Control at Northwell Health, in Great Neck, N.Y.
“These younger adults who smoke less aren’t even smokers,” she said, however, they’re still exposed to “risk to develop coronary heart disease by smoking even a tiny quantity of tobacco.”
In the new study, Hackshaw’s team analyzed information from the 141 studies. Because the average pack of cigarettes includes 20 cigarettes and the researchers predicted that the risk of suffering from heart stroke or heart disease for a smoker who smokes one cigarette a day is less than 5 percent the risk for a daily pack.
However, this was not the situation. Those who only smoked one cigarette per day still had 46 percent of the higher chances of developing heart disease smokers who smoke a lot were exposed to, as well as nearly 41 percent risk of stroke.
Women who smoked just cigarettes for just one day had 31 percent of the pack-aday smokers’ higher risk of suffering from heart disease as well as 34 percent higher risk of having a stroke the Hackshaw group found.
When researchers looked at research that looked at a variety of different risk factors discovered that smoking of just one smoke a day was still more than double the risk of dying from heart disease among women.
“We have found that a significant portion of the risk for coronary stroke and heart disease comes from smoking just two cigarettes a every day,” Hackshaw said in an article in a journal news release. “This is likely to come as a shock for most people. There are biological factors that contribute to the surprisingly high risk that is that is associated with a lower level in smoking.”
The Dr. Rachel Bond directs Women’s Heart Health at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. She has said she believed that “no level of nicotine is considered safe.”
She also said that attempts to quit smoking are effective however “true success lies in avoiding the whole process of exposing yourself to tobacco.”
