( Physicians typically use medication to ...)It's Never Too Late to Stop Smoking,Study Finds ,,,,,Health

Physicians typically use medication to treat patients suffering from congestive heart failure. But a study published in the May 2001 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology //suggests that getting these patients to stop smoking can have just as powerful an impact on their health as drugs.

"Even when patients have had significant heart damage from previous heart attacks and are currently in heart failure, stopping smoking is still very important and prolongs lives," explained lead author Dr. Neville Suskin, of the London Health Sciences Centre in London, Ontario. "It's never too late."

Drawing on data from 6,704 patients enrolled in the Studies of Left Ventricular Dysfunction Prevention and Intervention trials, Dr. Suskin and his colleagues compared the health of current smokers to ex-smokers who quit less than two years before, ex-smokers who quit more than two years before, and never-smokers.

The researchers weren't surprised to find that current smokers had a significantly higher rate of heart attacks, recurrent heart failure, and death than never-smokers and ex-smokers. What did surprise them was the fact that there were no significant differences in heart attack, recurrent heart failure, and death rates between ex-smokers and never-smokers, even after they accounted for baseline differences among the patients. Ex-smokers and never-smokers both had a 30-percent lower risk of dying than current smokers, a reduction in mortality similar to that achieved by angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors, beta-blockers, and other drugs commonly used to treat heart failure.

In a related editorial, Drs. James Lightwood, Kirsten E. Fleischmann, and Stanton A. Glantz, of the University of California at San Francisco, applauded the study for dispelling the myth that smokers are a lost cause. "Cardiologists need to incorporate aggressive efforts to promote smoking cessation into practice in the same w
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