Smokers

Smokers may show heart disease much younger than nonsmokers

A smoker’s coronary artery disease is likely to be as advanced as that of a non-smoker who is 10 years older when both show up at the hospital with a heart attack, according to a new study.

Researchers looked at nearly 14,000 patients hospitalized with blockages in arteries supplying the heart muscle and found smokers were more likely than nonsmokers to die within a year.

Despite their being younger, and otherwise healthier, the smokers’ heart arteries were in a condition similar to those of nonsmokers 10 years older.

“We saw smokers presenting the disease at age 55 and nonsmokers presenting the same disease at 65,” said Dr. Alexandra Lansky, a researcher on the study.

Smoking can cause blood clots, which often get lodged in the rigid and narrow arteries that have already been clogged by the buildup of cholesterol and fat deposits, according to Lansky and her colleagues.

Although the fat buildup and stiffening of the artery walls, known as atherosclerosis, becomes more likely with age for everyone, the clots caused by smoking worsen the blockages.

That makes smokers more likely to have a heart attack at a younger age, but less likely to have the other conditions, known as comorbidities, that go along with aging, such as diabetes and high blood pressure.

“Smoking accelerates the manifestation of coronary disease but in the absence of these comorbidities,” Lansky told Reuters Health.

Past research has identified a “smoker’s paradox” – because smokers are younger, with fewer other health problems, when they had a heart attack, they were more likely to recover it. Or so it seemed.

“We wanted to look at longer-term effects of smoking rather just the short term effect,” Lansky said.

The researchers analyzed medical records for 13,819 patients, almost 4,000 of them smokers, hospitalized with chest pain or a heart attack caused by a blocked coronary artery.

The study team organized the data to match the smokers and nonsmokers by age, weight, comorbidities and other risk factors.

When compared to nonsmokers with similar overall health, the smokers were ten years younger, on average, and more likely to have already been treated with blood thinners – suggesting they had already experienced problems with blood flow.

Imaging of the coronary artery showed the smokers’ had atherosclerosis comparable to the nonsmokers ten years their senior, the researchers report in the journal JACC: Cardiovascular Interventions.

Before the adjustments for age and other health conditions, the smokers and nonsmokers were about equally likely to survive the first 30 days after hospitalization, and smokers were about 20 percent less likely to die within a year.

But once smokers and nonsmokers with similar health profiles were compared to each other, the smokers were 37 percent more likely to die within the first year.

“What makes it novel, is that we are showing that if you come in, your chance of survival is already reduced, as a smoker,” Lansky said.

The findings are not surprising, according to Dr. Robert Giugliano, a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

“Nonetheless, the public does need to know that there is now even more evidence that smoking is bad for your health, accelerates the process of atherosclerosis (so smokers have heart and vascular disease on average 10 years early than non-smokers), and leads to worse outcomes compared to non-smokers of a similar age,” said Giugliano, who also teaches at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Elliot Antman, also of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard, said it would be interesting to follow the patients for longer than a year to see what happened to survival rates among smokers who quit.

Antman was not surprised by the findings either. “I always suspected this was the case but it is nice to see the data,” he told Reuters Health.

“There just aren’t many healthy people in their 80’s who smoke regularly . . . if you want to live a healthy, long life, smoking stacks the odds against you,” Giugliano said.

Source: reuters

Lung cancer scans urged for some smokers, not all

Certain current or former heavy smokers should start getting yearly scans for lung cancer to cut their risk of death from the nation’s top cancer killer, government advisers said Monday — even as they stressed that the tests aren’t for everyone.

The long-anticipated decision by the influential U.S. Preventive Services Task Force says these CT scans of the lungs should be offered only to people at especially high risk: those who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for 30 years or an equivalent amount, such as two packs a day for 15 years — and who are between the ages of 55 and 80.

That’s roughly 10 million people, but not all of them qualify for screening, said task force vice chairman Dr. Michael LeFevre, a University of Missouri family physician. Even those high-risk people shouldn’t be scanned if they’re not healthy enough to withstand cancer treatment, or if they kicked the habit more than 15 years ago.

Lung cancer kills nearly 160,000 Americans each year. Smoking is the biggest risk factor, and the more and longer people smoke, the higher their risk. Usually, lung cancer is diagnosed too late for treatment to succeed, but until now there hasn’t been a good means of early detection.

The newly recommended screening could prevent as many as 20,000 deaths a year, LeFevre said — if it’s used correctly.

That estimate assumes good candidates seek the scans. There’s no way to know if people at the highest risk will, or if instead the overly anxious will flood testing centers.

Screen the wrong people, “and we could see more harm than good,” LeFevre cautioned. “There’s a lot of room for what I would call people exploiting the recommendation. I can imagine a street-corner imaging center advertising to invite people in.”

Why not screen younger or lighter smokers? There’s no data to tell whether they’d be helped. Lung cancer is rare before age 50, and the major study that showed screening could save lives enrolled only heavy smokers starting at age 55.

But screening isn’t harm-free. A suspicious scan is far more likely to be a false alarm than a tumor, LeFevre noted. Yet patients may undergo invasive testing to find out, which in turn can cause complications.

Moreover, radiation accumulated from even low-dose CT scans can raise the risk of cancer. And occasionally, screening detects tumors so small and slow-growing that they never would have threatened the person’s life.

While screening clearly can benefit some people, “the best way to avoid lung cancer death is to stop smoking,” LeFevre added.

The task force proposed the screenings last summer but published its final recommendation Monday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. That clears the way for insurers to begin paying for the scans, which cost between $300 and $500, according to the American Lung Association.

Under the Obama administration’s health care law, cancer screenings that are backed by the task force are supposed to be covered with no copays, although plans have a year to adopt new recommendations.

Source: Yahoo news

Chinese Meditation helps to avoid tobacco by prevent 60%

Smokers can cut down on their tobacco use by using a type of meditation

Smokers can cut down on their tobacco use by using a type of meditation developed in China, a new study suggests.

The Texas Tech University and the University of Oregon study, which looked at the effect of the mindfulness meditation known as Integrative Body-Mind Training (IBMT) on the pathways in the brain related to addiction and self-control, discovered that by practicing the meditation exercise, smokers curtailed their habit by 60 percent.
The control group that received a relaxation regimen instead showed no reduction in their smoking.

“We found that participants who received IBMT training also experienced a significant decrease in their craving for cigarettes,” Yi-Yuan Tang, a co-author and director of Texas Tech`s Neuro imaging Institute, said.
“Because mindfulness meditation promotes personal control and has been shown to positively affect attention and openness to internal and external experiences, we believe that meditation may be helpful for coping with symptoms of addiction,” the researcher said.

IBMT, which involves whole-body relaxation, mental imagery and mindfulness training led by a qualified coach, has long been practiced in China.

It differs from other forms of meditation because it depends heavily on the inducement of a high degree of awareness and balance of the body, mind and environment.

The meditation state is facilitated through training and trainer-group dynamics, harmony and resonance.

Tang has studied the meditation practice for its potential impacts on a variety of stresses and related changes in the brain, including function and structure.

The findings are published in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Source: http://zeenews.india.com/ayurveda/chinese-meditation-helps-cut-tobacco-intake-by-60_1417.html