New reason to quit smoking....

Today's Post: Monday, 8-17-2009

It’s already known that few smokers have a clue how effective smoking is at causing heart disease. It does cause 30% or more of ALL cancers. But stroke or heart attack caused by cardiovascular disease kills way more smokers than the cancers cause by smoking. This is a much more certain effect of smoking. Virtually all smokers get some cardiovascular disease from smoking. This is why virtually all smokers test as showing excess plaque build up in their carotid arteries to their brains. More recently, it’s been found that smoking and second hand smoke trigger heart attacks in people who had some cardiovascular disease but might have gone several more years before having one.

In addition to that, you can test even younger smokers and show they are already being affected. Their homocysteine goes up which tends to cause cardiovascular disease and which increases their rate of aging. (This is even visible as older smokers get much more wrinkled at younger ages.) You can also show them that their breathing is reduced to the levels of nonsmokers who are MUCH older.

Smoking hardly needs and more bad press or reasons to quit, avoid second hand smoke, and ban smoking in public places, etc.

Today smoking got more bad press! It’s hardly a surprise; but we now have another way you can test smokers & younger smokers so that they can see that they ARE being affected right now by their smoking. And, it may be in part the reason why smoking and second hand smoke tend to trigger heart attacks.

Reuters Health has a story today titled, “Quitting smoking causes quick drop in inflammation.”

The medical journal Chest, for July 2009 was the source.

The new research found that several markers for inflammation, including C Reactive Protein or CRP high levels of which predict increased risk of heart attack, went down quite a bit within just a few weeks in a group of women who quit smoking & did so in just a few weeks. Even better, the decrease in inflammation began almost immediately and kept falling for about the 7 weeks of the study.

The findings point the way to a strategy for encouraging people at risk of heart disease to kick the habit, the study's authors say.

One of the researchers, Dr. Christine N. Metz of the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, New York noted that showing people about the "age and health" of their lungs is known to help people quit smoking.

She specifically suggested that tests for inflammation can now be added for further proof.

She is definitely on the right track. Doctors can now show smokers that they are being harmed NOW and for sure with an even larger number of tests. And they can do this with young smokers as well as older ones.

In a related story, in HealthDay News today had a story saying “Tobacco users who think it's safer to dip snuff or chew tobacco than smoke are dead wrong, researchers say.”

The study found that one pinch of smokeless tobacco delivered the same amount of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons as smoking five cigarettes. These are known to be carcinogenic. And, even before their study it was already known that 28 carcinogens had been found in smokeless tobacco.

They found much the same results with snuff.

Until this study was done, even scientists wrongly believed that, because the tobacco was not burned when used, only trace amounts of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons were in smokeless tobacco.

One possible explanation they mentioned is that even “smokeless tobacco is treated with a "fire-curing" process.

So, this set of information suggests that when smokers need a safer intermediate step once they quit smoking, smokeless tobacco is NOT a good choice for the ex-smoker. Both because it is more precisely dosed and because it is a medicine rather than a recreational use, nicotine replacement is far better than smokeless tobacco.