How harmful is secondhand smoke? Nonsmokers have a 25% to 30% higher risk of heart attack if they inhale smoke at home or at work, and smoke has been shown to affect heart health within minutes, says Dr. Meyers.
“We can measure chemical changes within 20 minutes,” he says. “The changes that occur primarily involve the clotting system. Basically, exposure to smoke makes your blood sticky and real clot-y and that’s what causes heart attacks.”
While this health effect is well established, it has not been clear if banning smoking could help reduce heart attacks, he says.
“We know that if you expose somebody, it’s bad,” says Dr. Meyers. “How about if you ban the exposure—will that make any difference? So that end of the logic had to be looked at, and now we can say, absolutely.”
With more time, research may also show that bans could lower rates of other smoking-related health problems, such as lung cancer, stroke, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a lung condition that includes emphysema and is the fourth leading cause of death in the United States.
“This is only the short-term result; lung cancer takes a lot longer to show up,” says Steven A. Schroeder, MD, the director of the Smoking Cessation Leadership Center at the University of California, San Francisco.
“And there will be a decrease in strokes; there’s already literature that shows that,” says Dr. Schroeder, who wrote an editorial accompanying Dr. Meyers’s study.
In the first study, James Lightwood, PhD, and Stanton Glantz, PhD, both of the University of California, San Francisco, analyzed data from 13 studies conducted in five countries. They found at least a 15% decline in heart-attack hospitalizations in the first year after smoke-free legislation was passed, and 36% after three years. The National Cancer Institute funded the study.
In the second study, Dr. Meyers and his colleagues analyzed data from 10 studies in 11 regions in the U.S. (including Montana, New York, Ohio, and Indiana), Canada, and Europe. The results were similar to those in Lightwood and Glantz’s study. (Both research teams looked at similar data.)
For example, in the 18 months after smoking was banned in bars, restaurants, bowling alleys, and other businesses in Pueblo, Colo., there was a 27% decline in heart attacks—down from 257 to 187 cases per 100,000 people per year. There was no drop in the surrounding communities.
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