Young smokers who quit enjoy heart health

Giving up smoking when you're young and the damage to your heart may be reversed.

Smoking disrupts the normal function of the arteries with the result that the lining can stop contracting and relaxing properly and begin to harden. This increases the risk of heart attack and stroke.

But in young adult male smokers, the early signs of heart disease dissipate soon after they kick the habit, a new study from Japan shows. The researchers used positron emission tomography or "PET" imaging to examine the effects of smoking cessation on the blood flow in the coronary arteries of men in their twenties and thirties who reported smoking an average of 20 cigarettes per day for more than 5 years and agreed to stop smoking for at least 6 months.

According to Dr. Nagara Tamaki of Hokkaido University in Sapporo and colleagues, after just one month without cigarettes, abnormal coronary artery function visible on PET scans had normalized. The improvement was preserved six months after the study subjects had quit smoking, the team reports.

The finding that young healthy smokers have impaired artery function but that it is reversible within a month after smoking cessation, supports the value of quitting smoking to ward off heart disease in young adults, the investigators say. They are eager to see if similar benefits can be obtained in middle-aged smokers.