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Can Smoking Ban Reduce Heart Attack Risk?
 

Smoking has long been regarded as a risk factor of a number of diseases including heart disease, stroke, respiratory diseases and lung cancer. But in reality, people who are exposed to secondhand smoke are also subject to similar kinds of risk even if they are not smokers.

Non-smokers exposed to secondhand smoke, also known as environmental tobacco smoke, are said to have involuntary smoking or passive smoking. The more secondhand smoke they breathe in, the higher the level of nicotine and toxic chemicals in their body.

Secondhand smoke is harmful in many ways. Every year in the United States, for instance, an estimated 46,000 deaths from heart disease in people who were non-smokers, and about 3,400 lung cancer deaths in non-smoking adults. The estimated cost of extra medical care, illness, and death caused by secondhand smoke exceeds $10 billion per year.

As more and more research have brought to the attention of general public regarding the risk of secondhand smoke, many states and governments have begun to ban smoking in the public places. In 1975, the state of Minnesota in the United States became the first state in the United States to restrict smoking in most public places. Initially, restaurants were required to provide ‘No Smoking Sections’ while bars were exempted from the ban. But with effect from October 1, 2007, smoking was banned in all restaurants and bars statewide.

Many countries including Australia, France, Germany, New Zealand, Singapore and United Kingdom also implement smoking bans (or some called smoke-free laws) to prohibit tobacco smoking in workplaces and other public spaces.

The smoke-free laws can quickly and dramatically reduce the number of hospitalizations arising from heart attacks, strokes and respiratory diseases like asthma and emphysema. This was what the researchers from the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California-San Francisco had found.

In the paper published on November 12, 2012 in ‘Circulation’, they reported that hospitalization resulted from heart attack, stroke, and respiratory disease fell an average of 15 percent, 16 percent and 24 percent respectively after smoking was banned in areas such as restaurants, bars and workspaces. The analysis included 45 studies covering 33 laws in American cities and states, as well as countries like Germany and New Zealand.

Smoke-free laws also reduced health care costs for individuals, health plans, and government payers, according to researchers. Total saving ranged from $302,000 in all health care costs in Starkville, Mississippi to about $7 million on hospitalization cost on heart attack only in Germany.

Another study that was conducted by researchers from Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota also found that heart attacks fell by 33 percent after expanding the smoking ban to all workplaces, including bars in 2007. The law, actually came in force in 2002 with smoking ban applied only to restaurants in Olmsted County, Minnesota, but had no effect on reducing cases of heart attacks. Their findings were published on November 12, 2012 in the ‘ Archives of Internal Medicine’.

Both reports did not explain why smoking bans cut heart attack cases. But the smoke-free laws must have forced some people to smoke less or totally quit smoking. This means fewer people would smoke at home. According to Mayo Clinic’s findings, the percentage of smoke-free homes in the state grew from 64.5 percent in 1999 to 87.2 percent in 2010, a period in which state and federal taxes also rose significantly.

With smoker-free law, non-smokers can be protected too. Secondhand smoke affects a non-smoker’s blood vessel in as little as 5 minutes, causing changing that would raise the risk of heart attack.

It appears from the aforesaid findings that the more comprehensive the law, the greater is the impact. Lawmakers should, therefore, never consider exempting certain facilities like bars or casinos from smoke-free laws, otherwise these exemptions could well put some people into the emergency room.

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