Kick the Habit, Help the Heart
Once women stop smoking, odds of dying from chronic disease drop

(HealthDay News) -- Women who smoke might want to think about this: The toll smoking takes on the heart can be reversed.

Research has shown that women who quit smoking cut their risk of death from heart disease nearly in half within five years. The risk of dying from other conditions also declines after kicking the habit.

Smoking, the leading preventable cause of death in the United States , causes an array of health problems, including heart disease, cancer and respiratory diseases.

"It's never too early to stop and it's never too late to stop," Stacey Kenfield, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, told HealthDay .

"The harms of smoking are reversible and can decline to the level of non-smokers," she said. "For some conditions like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, it can take more than 20 years, but there is a rapid reduction for others."

A study by Kenfield found that former female smokers were 47 percent less likely to die of coronary heart disease five years after quitting. The analysis of 22 years of data from more than 100,000 women taking part in the Nurses' Health Study also showed that a woman's overall risk of dying was 13 percent lower five years after quitting smoking.

Within 20 years after quitting, the risk of overall death returned to the level of someone who'd never smoked, the study found.

Compared with women who'd never smoked, current smokers had nearly triple the risk of overall death and were 63 percent more likely to develop colon cancer. Former smokers had a 23 percent higher risk of colon cancer than never-smokers.

Among former smokers, the risk for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) did not return to normal for more than 20 years, but the risk of death from COPD declined by 13 percent within five to 10 years after quitting, according to the study.

And, though it took 30 years after quitting for the risk of lung cancer to return to normal, that risk fell by 21 percent in the first five years after quitting.

The findings, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association , illustrate the benefits of quitting smoking, said Dr. Jay Brooks, chairman of hematology/oncology at Ochsner Health System in Baton Rouge , La.

"We've known this for a number of years, but the beauty of this study is it is a very large and well-studied group of people," Brooks told HealthDay .

But he also issued a caution.

"When I tell people to quit smoking, I say the effect of the heart precedes that of the lungs," Brooks said. "If you've smoked, you need to be cognizant that you're still at increased risk of lung cancer."

On the Web

To learn more about women and smoking, visit the American Cancer Society.

SOURCES: HealthDay News ; Stacey A. Kenfield, Sc.D., postdoctoral research fellow, Department of Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston; Jay Brooks, M.D., chairman of hematology/oncology, Ochsner Health System, Baton Rouge, La.; May 7, 2008, Journal of the American Medical Association
Author: Robert Preidt
Publication Date: May 31, 2009
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