Quitting Smoking Rejuvenates Arteries

10 years after last cigarette, vessels regain lost flexibility, study finds.

By Ed Edelson
HealthDay Reporter
Monday, March 19, 2007; 12:00 AM

Copyright © 2007 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.

MONDAY, March 19 (HealthDay News) -- Smoke-stiffened arteries will slowly regain a healthy flexibility if smokers kick the habit, a new study finds.

"It took a while before the arteries came back to normal," stressed Dr. Azra Mahmud, a lecturer in cardiovascular pharmacology at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, where the study was done. "It took at least 10 years before the arteries got back to where they were before smoking. The lesson is that the more quickly you give up smoking, the better it is for your arteries."

Hardened arteries can increase blood pressure, boosting the risk of cardiovascular problems such as heart attack and stroke.

Mahmud and her colleagues have done a series of studies on changes in blood vessels due to smoking. This latest trial, reported Monday in the March issue of Hypertension, included 554 people who had high blood pressure but had never been treated for it. The group included 268 people who had never smoked, 150 current smokers and 136 ex-smokers.

Of the ex-smokers, 22 had stopped for less than a year, 40 for 1 to 10 years and 40 for at least 10 years.

"We did the study to see if there was any benefit in quitting smoking in getting arteries back to a younger age," Mahmud said.

What they found was that blood vessels regained their flexibility in direct proportion to the length of time passed since that last cigarette.

The researchers used a technology called "arterial pulse wave analysis" to measure arterial stiffness. It showed significantly increased stiffness in both the current smokers and those who had quit less than a year ago. The major gain in flexibility came a decade or more after quitting, the researchers said.

"Its interesting from the scientific point of view that things like vascular stiffness could be improved," said Dr. Roger Blumenthal, director of the Johns Hopkins Ciccarone Preventive Cardiology Center in Baltimore and a spokesman for the American Heart Association. "Lots of people thought they couldn't. This shows that you can change for the better, once you quit smoking," he said.