When it comes to heart disease prevention, it is very important for you to be aware of the various aspects associated with heart disease and smoking. Information plays the key role here. The more informed you are, the better you can protect yourself. It is a well-known fact that smoking often leads to lung cancer, but not many people know that it is also one of the most powerful causes of cardiac disease. Last year, over 1.5 million smokers died at a premature age because of heart disease. On the other hand, the total number of premature deaths because of lung cancer was around one million. This way, if we go with the statistics, we find that smokers are more susceptible to cardiac diseases in comparison to other smoking-related diseases.
Quit Smoking To Prevent Heart Diseases
Considering the harmful effects that smoking can have on your health, you are strongly recommended to quit smoking. When it comes to heart disease and smoking, just cutting down on cigarettes is not enough. Always remember, that even light smoking can be very harmful. Recent researches have shown that smoking as few as only 1-2 cigarettes per day also substantially increases the risk of a heart attack. Though this is true for both men and women, unfortunately the situation is much worse in case of women smokers. This way, you are sadly mistaken if you assume that cutting down the number of cigarettes will be sufficient to prevent heart disease. You have no other choice but to quit smoking completely.
Passive Smoking Is As Harmful As Active Smoking
If you spend too much time with friends and colleagues who are heavy smokers, you are probably a victim of passive smoking. Since you are still inhaling tobacco smoke, you too are at an increased risk of lung cancer and heart disease. In fact, some researchers believe that side-stream smoking is more dangerous than active smoking. Passive smoking for a long time is very much likely to result in coronary artery disease. As per a recent research, exposure to passive tobacco smoke increases the risk of coronary heart disease by twenty-five percent. Therefore, even if you don’t smoke, you have to be very careful at public places or when you spend time with your friends who smoke. Don’t forget, passive smoking causes “only” three thousand premature deaths from lung cancer in America every year, but it causes over forty thousand deaths because of heart attack.
Smoking Is One Of The Major Causes Of Heart Attacks In Younger Patients
Heart attacks before age 40 is not very common. But, chances are high for those who smoke. The more you smoke, the sooner you are likely to suffer from this life-threatening disease. Therefore, if you are looking for the safest way to protect your health, you are left with no option but to quit smoking.
Thus, heart disease and smoking go hand by hand. Smoking greatly accelerates the hardening of the arteries (atherosclerosis). It can happen to any body at any age. Smokers who survive past forty often face a more complicated situation, where it becomes very difficult to control the disease, let alone cure the same.