Quit smoking helps after heart attack

It's never too late for smokers to do their hearts good by kicking the habit - even after a heart attack has left them with significant damage to the organ's main pumping chamber.

Past studies have found that smokers who give up smoking after suffering a heart attack have a lower rate of repeat heart attacks and live longer than their counterparts who continue to smoke. But little has been known about the benefits of quitting among heart attack patients left with a complication called left ventricular (LV) dysfunction - where damage to the heart's main pumping chamber significantly reduces its blood-pumping efficiency.  It has been unclear whether that dysfunction might drown out the heart benefits of smoking cessation. To investigate this, researchers studied 2,231 patients with LV dysfunction.

It was found that those who quit smoking within six months of their heart attack were less likely to die within five years or suffer a repeat attack than smokers who continued the habit. Of all patients, 463 were smokers at the time of the heart attack but had quit six months later; 268 were still smoking at the six-month mark. Among quitters, 15 percent died or suffered another heart attack by the end of the study, which followed the patients for up to five years. That compared with a rate of 23 percent among patients who were still smoking six months after their initial heart attack.

When the researchers accounted for a number of other factors - including age, medical history and body weight - smoking cessation itself was linked to a 40 percent reduction in the risk of death compared with persistent smoking. Quitters were about 30 percent less likely to die, suffer a repeat heart attack or be hospitalized for heart failure during the study period. These findings indicate that smoking cessation is beneficial after high-risk heart attack and highlight the importance of smoking cessation as a therapeutic target in such patients.

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