Quitting Smoking Resets Your Heart

Posted: April 24, 2014 | tobacco | health, heart, quit, smoking, tobacco | 0 Comments

“It’s never too late to quit smoking. This study clearly shows that stopping smoking lowers the risk of heart attacks and death to the level of never smokers.” – Dr. James K. Min

According to a new, multinational study lasting over two years, quitting smoking will eventually lower your rate of heart attack to the same level as people who have never smoked in their life.

Dr. James K. Min and Dr. Rine Nakanishi conducted the study at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital and the Weill Cornell Medical College and studied 13,372 patients from Europe, North America and East Asia. The patients were divided into three groups: active smokers, former smokers and non-smokers.

The study concluded that active smokers are nearly twice as likely to suffer a heart attack or die as non-smokers are. However, the study also found that after 2 years, people who formerly smoked have the same risk of heart attack as those who had never smoked. This means that quitting smoking will actually reduce your risk of heart attack to the same level as someone who has never lit up in their life. If ever a smoker needed motivation to quit, this may just be it.

The study did find, however, that while the heart itself can essentially erase the damage caused by smoking, the arteries that pump blood into your heart cannot. Even if you quit smoking, you remain 1.5 to 2 times more likely to suffer from coronary artery disease (CAD) than someone who doesn’t smoke. Granted, the risk may drop eventually, but this study saw no such drop after two years nor did it find any logical reason to suggest that it would.

If ever there were an argument for not only quitting smoking but to never pick it up, doctors Kim & Nakanishi have found it.