Report: Smoking Bans Reduce Heart Attacks

(AP)  A major report confirms what health officials have long believed: Bans on smoking in restaurants, bars and other gathering spots reduce the risk of heart attacks among nonsmokers.

More than 126 million nonsmoking Americans are regularly exposed to someone else's tobacco smoke. The surgeon general in 2006 cited "overwhelming scientific evidence" that tens of thousands die each year as a result, from heart disease, lung cancer and a list of other illnesses.

Yet smoking bans have remained a hard sell in Ohio and elsewhere, as lawmakers and business owners debate whether such prohibitions are worth the anger of smoking customers or employees.

Thursday's hard-hitting report from the Institute of Medicine promises to influence that debate here and abroad.

"The evidence is clear," said Dr. Thomas Frieden, head of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which requested the study. "Smoke-free laws don't hurt business ... but they prevent heart attacks in nonsmokers."

Among the IOM report's conclusions: While heavier exposure to secondhand smoke is worse, there's no safe level. And it cited "compelling" if circumstantial evidence that even less than an hour's exposure might be enough to push someone already at risk of a heart attack over the edge — as the smoke's pollution-like small particles and other substances can quickly affect blood vessels.

"There is no question that smoking bans have a positive health effect," said Dr. Lynn Goldman, an environmental health specialist at Johns Hopkins University who chaired the IOM committee.

Since New York led the way in 2003, 21 states plus the District of Columbia now have what the CDC calls comprehensive statewide laws banning smoking in both public and private workplaces, restaurants and bars — with no exception for ventilated smoking areas. Some other states have less restrictive laws.

That means 41 percent of Americans are as protected in public from secondhand smoke as possible, Frieden said. The IOM report found just 5 percent of the world's population was covered by comprehensive smoke-free laws.

In Ohio, a workplace smoking ban approved by voters took effect in May 2007 and has faced several legal challenges since.

While the public mostly connects smoking with lung cancer, heart disease is a more immediate consequence. About a third of all heart attacks in the U.S. are related to smoking, Frieden said. Both actively smoking and breathing others' smoke can damage blood vessels and increase heart attack-causing blood clots.

How much do bans help? That depends on how existing bans were studied and how much secondhand smoke exposure different populations have. Some heavily exposed nonsmokers have the same risk of heart damage as people who smoke up to nine cigarettes a day, Goldman said.

Her committee reviewed 11 key studies of smoking bans in parts of the U.S., Canada, Italy and Scotland, and found drops in the number of heart attacks that ranged from 6 percent to 47 percent.

The impact can be quick: Helena, Mont., for example, recorded 16 percent fewer heart attack hospitalizations in the six months after its ban went into effect than in the same months during previous years, while nearby areas that had no smoking ban saw heart attacks rise. More dramatically, heart attack hospitalizations dropped 41 percent in the three years after Pueblo, Col., banned workplace smoking.

The Institute of Medicine is part of the National Academies, an independent organization chartered by Congress to advise the government on scientific matters.

[MichaelJMcFadden]

Heh... I see I'm being attacked by Gene Borio on boards I've never even been to! LOL! One of these nights I'm gonna wake up and find him peering through a window at me! :> Very strange man, even for an Antismoker.

By the way, in the six months or so since this article was published, the "major ... hard hitting report" has pretty much been demolished. They not only made a major mistake in their computations that cut their claim in half, but then that leftover half turned out to be almost perfectly equal to the drop in heart attacks everywhere else in the country whether bans were in place or not!

It's also cute seeing the numbers on Helena drop from the original 60% claim that made national television/newspapers, down to 40% when it was actually published, and now down to 16% after some unknown further "correction" seems to have been made. Meanwhile the latest large scale research to be published in this area a few months ago, the NBER/Rand/Standford study by Shetty et al, found NO post ban decreases, and their finding was not only presaged by the study Dave Kuneman and I carried out five years ago, but has now been corroborated by a brand new meta-analytical study presented at the American Heart Assn. Conference just last week.

Smoking bans are based on lies, and those lies are gradually coming more and more to light. Google "V.Gen5H" and read "The Lies Behind The Smoking Bans" for more on that.

Michael J. McFadden,
Author of "Dissecting Antismokers' Brains"

[geneb5]

CBS's site is under attack from a nationwide pro-smoking spam brigade -- "youvebeenhad," "Laprade," and by extension the book salesman McFadden -- fanatic campaigners who are trying desperately to warp what started out as just a regular discussion amongst locals. They hijack message boards like CBS's to raise the google rankings of their screwball websites and sell books.

These vile gnats infest message boards across the country. Google them.

[snowbird1]

Smoking bans and the Heart Attack Fraud

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7451/

[dragon8me]

Propaganda pure and simple. It proves nothing. It's too short a time to compare for one and there are many factors to consider. There just trying to ban tobacco altogether. Prohibition of ANY substance is anti-American. I have no problem with banning it in closed spaces that don't have adaquate ventalation but if a bussiness has a desiginated place that is well vented there shouldn't be a problem. No one who don't want to breath smoke should have to but at the same time an all our ban is not the best way to do things. They just want the easy way out, instead of using science to find options.

[jennifer-marie]

I really want to know exactly how they can attribute a reduction in heart attacks specifically to smoking bans. Heart attacks and heart disease are linked to and caused by MULTIPLE factors. Perhaps a part of it was the smokers who stopped eating out so much, or going to the bars so much, thereby causing better eating at home and less drinking? This is such a biased and one-sided study. What other factors did they take into consideration at the time the smoking bans went into effects? Or did they take any other factors into consideration at all?

I'm not saying I'm against smoking bans, but I am saying I'm against fraudulent studies and reports designed to make the American public nod their heads and "Baaaah!" because politicians and special interest groups wants us to.