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HowToPreventHeartDisease.com |
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Why Women Should Stay Away From Cigarettes? It is very clear that smoking is bad for the health. While the smoking rate among men is declining, there are more women are smoking around the world. A 2006 report by the International Network of Women Against Tobacco indicated that about 12 percent of women worldwide smoke and the figure would reach 20 percent by 2025. Recent statistics showed that a fifth of the world's 1.1 billion smokers were women. An analysis released in March 2011 indicated that the rising economic and political status had lead millions of women in developing countries to smoke, and risk disease and death. A paper published on August 10, 2011 in ‘The Lancet’ medical journal warned that women who smoke cigarettes are more likely to develop heart disease than men. After reviewing data on 2.4 million people and 44,000 cardiac events, researchers from the University of Minnesota found that female smokers had a 25 percent greater risk of developing coronary heart disease than male smokers. They also found that the difference in risk for male and female smokers increased by 2 percent for every year they smoke. The physical differences between men and women or the differences in smoking habits could attribute to such findings, according to researchers. For instance, women would probably absorb more of the harmful agents in cigarettes compared to men, as indicated by some data. Women might also inhale more smoke or they might smoke more intensively. Besides heart disease, women who smoke, even for a short time, are at a higher risk of suffering peripheral artery disease (PAD). PAD is a condition in which arteries in the extremities (often legs) are narrow and so blood flow is reduced to the area. This would result in pain. About 8 million Americans are affected by PAD, as shown by the statistics provided by the American Heart Association (AHA).
Researchers from Harvard Medical School reported on June 7, 2011 in the journal ‘Annals of Internal Medicine’ that women who smoked were as much as 20 times more likely to develop PAD over a 13-year period than women who did not smoke. They convinced that smoking is a very strong risk factor for the development of PAD, just like lung disease and heart attack. Quitting smoking could reduce the risk of developing but even those who had quit 20 years ago still had a higher risk of PAD than nonsmokers. In 1993, the study began with 38,825 women who were then aged 45 or older, none of whom had cardiovascular disease. About 50 percent of the women had never smoked, 36 percent were former smokers, 8 percent smoked more than 15 cigarettes a day and 5 percent smoked less than 15 cigarettes a day. By the end of the study, 178 women had developed PAD. The more cigarettes smoked, the higher the risk of PAD. Women who smoked at least one pack a day for 10 years had a particularly steep risk of developing the condition. There was, however, no threshold below which smokers were safe from developing PAD. The results held even after taking into account factors that could affect developing PAD, including age and a history of high blood pressure and diabetes. The study, however, did not account for women who might have had PAD without showing symptoms. Meanwhile, as the participants were mainly white women, the findings might not apply to the population as a whole. National Institutes of Health explained that the chemicals in cigarettes could damage the blood vessels and raise the risk of arteriosclerosis (plaque buildup in the arteries). This in turn also increases the risk of PAD. Hence, it is very important that collaborative effort should be promoted by all parties including health professionals and governments to refrain people especially women from taking up smoking and encourage smokers to stop lighting up cigarettes.
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