Women Who Quit Smoking Lower Heart Risks Quickly

By Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter
Wednesday, May 7, 2008; 3:00 AM

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TUESDAY, May 6 (HealthDay News) -- New research shows that women who quit smoking have a 47 percent lower risk of dying from coronary heart disease within five years of extinguishing their last cigarette.

The risks of dying from other conditions also decline after quitting, although the time frame varies depending on the disease.

"The harms of smoking are reversible and can decline to the level of nonsmokers," said study author Stacey Kenfield, whose report is in the May 7 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. "For some conditions like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, it can take more than 20 years, but there is a rapid reduction for others."

"It's never too early to stop, and it's never too late to stop," added Kenfield, who is a postdoctoral research fellow in the department of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.

Smoking is still the leading preventable cause of death in the United States. Not only does tobacco smoke cause lung cancer, it is also implicated in heart disease, other cancers and respiratory diseases.

According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 3 million people in industrialized countries will have died as a result of tobacco use by 2030, and an additional 7 million people in developing countries face the same fate.

This research is a continued follow-up on the Nurses' Health Study, a large trial involving more than 100,000 women. Scientists now have 22 years of data on the participants.

Current smokers had almost triple the risk of overall death compared with women who had never smoked.

Current smokers also had a 63 percent increased risk for colon cancer compared with never-smokers, while former smokers had a 23 percent increased risk. There was no significant association between smoking and ovarian cancer.

And women who started smoking earlier in life were at a higher risk for overall mortality, of dying from respiratory disease and from any smoking-related disease.

However, a smoker's overall risk of dying returned to the level of a never-smoker 20 years after quitting. The overall risk declined 13 percent within the first five years of abstaining.