Smoking and Heart Disease.

How Smoking Can Affect the Heart 

Smoking cigarettes can hurt your cardiovascular health in many ways by:

• Delivering toxins to the blood, which hastens atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) from the buildup of plaque (fatty deposits), which causes coronary heart disease (CHD), which leads to heart attacks
• Increasing blood pressure
• Reducing exercise capacity
• Decreasing the "good cholesterol," or HDL
• Increasing the risk of blood clots
• Exacerbating the potential for CHD caused by birth control pills

Men and women over age 50 face an even greater risk of these consequences. Altering your habits may reduce some of the damage, but not nearly as much as quitting:

• Low-nicotine or low-tar cigarettes: Seem to harm your cardiovascular system nearly as much as regular cigarettes.
• Pipe smoking and cigars: Increases the risk of death from CHD, but not as much as cigarette smoking.
• Occasional smoking: Slightly raises your risk of CHD.
• Second-hand smoke: Has been linked to nearly 70,000 early deaths from CHD.

Quitting Smoking

Although smokers are four times more likely to develop CHD, quitting substantially reduces that risk. Even if you've already been diagnosed with CHD, quitting can stabilize your condition. It's not easy, but the American Heart Association offers several tips to help you through the process.

• Read over a list several times each day of the reasons you're quitting.
• Cut down before you stop, starting with the cigarettes that you crave least.
• Keep a smoking diary of when you smoke and why, if known.
• Set a date for quitting.
• Try stopping for 48 hours at one time before first.
• When you quit, quit completely; do not keep any cigarettes in the house.
• Stay busy.
• Try to avoid situations in which you previously smoked.

One year after stopping smoking, your additional risk of CHD decreases by 50%. After 15 years, the odds are the same as someone who never smoked.

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