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Heart Disease Prevention - Should Outdoor Smoking Bans Be Supported?

While most of the smoking bans are meant for indoor public places, lately there is intention for legislators to extend smoking bans to outdoor. A recent review of public surveys pointed out that a growing number of people in the United States and Canada support smoke-free laws for outdoor places, especially where children congregate or at building entrances. Find out more at:

Heart Disease Prevention - Should Outdoor Smoking Bans Be Supported?

Would Secondhand Smoke Raise Atrial Fibrillation Risk?

Smoking is bad for the health as it is linked to development of many chronic diseases including lung cancer, heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Secondhand smoke, also known as passive smoking, is equally bad for the body. Every year, it causes about 34,000 deaths from heart disease and 7,300 deaths from lung cancer in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC).

On September 1, 2015, researchers from the University of California published a paper online in the journal ‘HeartRhythm’ indicating that people exposed to secondhand smoke in the womb or as children are at a higher risk later in life for atrial fibrillation.

Being an irregular heart rhythm, atrial fibrillation has been shown by previous studies to be linked to smoking, but the association with secondhand smoke exposure was unclear. Atrial fibrillation causes the heart's upper and lower chambers to stop working together. The condition is one of the most common causes of stroke, and can cause chest pain and heart failure, too. It affects millions of Americans and it nearly doubles mortality.

The researchers used data from 4,976 people participating in an Internet-based study on heart health to analyze their exposure to secondhand smoke to see if they had atrial fibrillation. 11.9 percent of participants reported having atrial fibrillation.

After accounting for factors that might have affected the participants’ risks for atrial fibrillation, including age, sex, race, other health conditions, and smoking and alcohol use, they found that adults had 37 percent higher chances of atrial fibrillation if either of their parents smoked while the mother was pregnant. The adults had 40 percent higher risks if they lived with a smoker as a child. The risk was even higher among people who did not have other risk factors for atrial fibrillation.

Results of the findings surprised many health, particularly because the risk starts rising even as the baby is developing in the mother's womb. It seems likely that toxins in tobacco smoke could have a direct impact on development of the heart's electrical system.

Parents’ should really think twice of the consequence of the profound effect of their smoking. As such, smokers are encouraged to talk to their doctor about therapies available to help them quit if they plan to have children.

While quitting smoking is never easy, it can still be done. Smokers absolutely must find a way to quit if they want to give their children the best possible chance at a healthy childhood as well as a healthy adulthood.

Can Mobile Phone Help Smoker Quit?

Smoking is bad for the health as it harms almost all organs of the body. It will lead to many diseases including lung cancer, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), heart disease and stroke. The secondhand smoke from smokers’ cigarettes can also cause many of these diseases to people around them.

Governments around the world have been actively finding means and ways to suppress smoking rate by educating smokers as well as implementing smoking bans (or some called smoke-free laws).

According to a New Zealand’s study, text and video messages that appeared on mobile phones and designed to help people quit smoking almost doubled the success rate for attempted quitters, comparing with people who did not have such assistance.

The findings, which were published on November 14, 2012 in ‘The Cochrane Library’, reported that 9 percent of intended quitters stopped smoking for at least 6 months when reminded and encouraged through mobile phone messages, compared to 5 percent who did not have such service.

Mobile phone programs involved a text message or video conveying motivation and advice sent to smokers every day for several weeks to prepare them for the designated quit day. After the quit day, multiple messages were often sent to intended quitter each day for weeks. The messages offered encouragement, tips on getting through cravings and additional resources to quit again after a relapse.

Researchers from the University of Auckland in New Zealand and other institutions reviewed 5 studies and compared mobile phone messaging to no extra help.

A total of 9,100 smokers were tracked for 6 months. Among 4,730 participants assigned to a text or video messaging program, 444 managed to kick the habit. On the other hand, 240 out of the 4,370 participants who did not receive any additional services stopped smoking for 6 months.

Quit smoking requires a great deal of effort and most people require few attempt to quit. Many of the intended quitters still continue smoking even if they have tried a texting program. Nevertheless, the mobile texting programs are automated and easy to scale up for widespread use. It is important to offer smokers as many tools as possible to help them quit smoking.

Link Between Second-hand Smoke And Heart Disease

People are already aware that smoking is linked to many medical disorders including heart disease, hypertension (high blood pressure), stroke, lung cancer and COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease).

But how about second-hand smoke that affect non-smokers?

Second-hand smoke is also known as environment tobacco smoke (ETS) and it is a mixture of 2 forms of smoke coming from burning tobacco, namely sidestream smoke (smoke that comes from the end of a lighted cigarette, pipe, or cigar) and mainstream smoke (the smoke that is exhaled by a smoker).

Non-smokers are said to have involuntary smoking or passive smoking when they are exposed to second-hand smoke. The more they are exposed to, the higher the level of those harmful chemicals will be inhaled into the body.

Researchers from the Chinese PLA General Hospital in Beijing found that people regularly exposed to second-hand smoke might raise their risk of dying from various causes including heart disease and lung cancer, comparing to those who lived and worked in a smoke-free environment.

The findings of a long-term study based on 910 adults (439 men and 471 women) who were followed over a period of 17 years were published in the May 2012’s issue of journal ‘Chest’. At the outset, 44.2 percent lived with a smoker, while 52.9 percent inhaled second-hand smoke at work.

249 participants (150 men and 99 women) died over the following years. The risk of death from heart disease, stroke, lung cancer and emphysema were 2 to 3 times higher for people who were exposed to second-hand smoke.

11 percent of the 271 men exposed to second-hand smoke died of stroke, comparing to 6.5 percent of the 168 men who lived and worked in smoke-free surroundings. Though the study could not prove that second-hand smoke was the culprit, they did find evidence of dose-response relationship, which is key to building the case for a cause-and-effect relationship.

The study also revealed that second-hand smoke exposure is highly prevalent in China, the largest producer and consumer of tobacco in the world. In 2010, about one-third of the world’s cigarettes are consumed by China’s 301 million smokers.

How Did Movies Affect Teen Smoking?

Smoking is undoubtedly a unwanted habit that should not be encouraged because it can cause smokers as well as people around them (through secondhand smoke) suffer chronic diseases including lung cancer, heart disease, stroke, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary) and erectile dysfunction. It can lead to birth defects, too.

Teens smoke for a number of reasons. Pressure among the peers and smoking habit of parents or relatives tend to influence the teens to follow suit. A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), however, indicated that smoking among teens is somehow related to movies with tobacco.

According to their findings that were published on July 14, 2011 in the ‘Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report’, number of movies in the United States in which an actor smoked fell sharply between 2005 and 2010.

55 percent of movies that had huge box office grossing in the United States in 2010 did not have smoking scenes, compared with a third of films that scored huge box office success in 2005.

During the same 6-year period, the number of tobacco incidents in top-grossing movies fell by 56 percent, though there were still some 2,000 scenes where an actor used tobacco either openly, on screen, or implicitly, off-screen. In fact, the percentages of 2010 top-grossing movies with no tobacco incidents were the highest observed in 2 decades.

In 2010, a study released by CDC found that the percentage of middle school students in the United States who smoked fell from 11 percent to 5 percent between 2000 and 2009 and those who experimented with smoking fell from nearly 30 percent to 15 percent.

Meanwhile, use of other tobacco products like cigars, pipes and chewing tobacco was also down among middle school boys aged between 11 and 14. The smoking among high school students was also down though less sharply.

17 percent of high school students smoked cigarettes in 2009, comparing to 28 percent in 2000, while 3 in 10 high school students tried smoking 2 years ago, comparing to nearly 4 in 10 in 2000.

The drop in onscreen smoking might have contributed to the decline in smoking among middle school and high school students.