One Cigarette a Day Greatly Raises your Cardiovascular disease Risk

Smoking Even One Cigarette a Day Raises Cardiovascular Risk

For people who think that smoking only one or two cigarettes a day carries little cardiovascular risk, a powerful new study maintains the only way to reduce risk is to quit, full stop.

The investigators anticipated that smoking one cigarette a day would be associated with about 5% of the excess relative risk of smoking 20 cigarettes a day, but they found it actually accounts for 46% of excess Coronary Heart Disease risk in men and 31% of the risk in women. 

For the less commonly reported smoking-related outcome of stroke, the excess risk associated with just one cigarette per day was 41% for men and 34% for women.

There's been a big shift from people smoking 20 to 25 cigarettes a day to only smoking a few cigarettes a day with the assumption that's good enough for them. Their view is that smoking only a couple a day can't be harmful and that's probably not far off the truth for risk for cancer. For many smokers that's probably the first thing that comes to mind, but cardiovascular risk is the big one.

The main public health impact of this is that smokers have done well in reducing and there are various methods to help them quit and cut down, but the aim is to keep on searching for those methods, find one that suits them, and to cut down and then quit completely."

The unfortunate thing for cardiovascular disease is that the adverse effects seem to come through quite quickly after only 2 or 3 years of smoking and the impact is quite big. The good thing is that if you quit smoking, a lot of your risk goes away quite quickly as opposed to cancer, where it takes several years to mainly go away.