Kicking the Habit Slashes Heart Deaths in UK: Study

People who quit smoking accounted for almost half of the decline in coronary heart disease deaths seen in Britain since the 1970s, researchers reported on Monday.

People who quit smoking accounted for almost half of the decline in coronary heart disease deaths seen in Britain since the 1970s, researchers reported on Monday. Heart disease is still the No. 1 killer in the industrialized world, but deaths from heart disease have been cut about in half over the past 30 years, the researchers report in this week’s issue of the journal Circulation. They found that death rates from coronary heart disease in England and Wales fell by 62 percent in men, and 45 percent in women, who were 25 to 84 years old between 1981 and 2000. They found that 48 percent of the reduction could be attributed to people stopping smoking. Another 10 percent was due to lowered blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Overall, changes in the three major risk factors resulted in about 35,944 fewer deaths, they said. Modern medical interventions accounted for 42 percent of the decline, they said, adding that their findings may be “cautiously generalizable” to the United States and other developed countries where heart disease deaths have also been cut in half. Medical and surgical treatments together prevented or postponed about 25,805 deaths, the researchers found. But coronary artery bypass graft surgery and a procedure called angioplasty, which opens clogged arteries, surprisingly accounted for only 3.8 percent of the reduction in deaths, said Dr. Simon Capewell of the University of Liverpool. “Four percent is a disappointingly small contribution, considering the large financial and political resources being committed to promote revascularization,” he said in a statement. Capewell and colleagues used a computer model to come up with their findings, analyzing population size, numbers of patients, treatments given, and trends in risk factors such as smoking, diet, blood pressure, physical activity, obesity and diabetes. They found that people tended to exercise less over the 20 years, and the obesity and diabetes rates went up, “basically canceling out two decades of improvement in cholesterol,” Capewell said. (Source: Reuters Health: March 2004: Medline Plus)