Light smoking significantly increases risk of heart disease, study finds

New research dismantles the long-held belief that smoking less means less harm.

Scientists now say that the body suffers significant cardiovascular damage even at low levels of smoking.

Researchers at the American Heart Association’s Tobacco Regulator and Addiction Center analyzed data from 22 long-term health studies involving more than 320,000 adults.

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The findings, published in PLOS Medicine, show that smoking even a few cigarettes a day significantly increases the risk of heart disease and premature death and that quitting completely is the only way to reverse these risks.

In the study, adults were divided into never smokers, current smokers and former smokers, according to a press release.

A large long-term study finds that even minimal smoking can double the risk of heart disease and death. (iStock)

The researchers looked at how much tobacco people smoked, measuring it in “pack-years” and cigarettes per day. For former smokers, they looked at how long ago they stopped smoking.

The team then compared these trends to multiple health outcomes, including heart attacks, strokes, heart failure, atrial fibrillation and overall mortality rates.

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Current smokers are more than twice as likely to die from any cause as people who have never smoked.

Those who smoked just two to five cigarettes a day were twice as likely to develop heart disease.

Smoking just two to five cigarettes a day can more than double the risk of any type of heart disease and increase the risk of death from any cause by 60% compared to people who have never smoked. (iStock)

“Smoking even two to five cigarettes a day can more than double your risk of any type of heart disease and increase your risk of death from any cause by 60 percent compared to people who have never smoked,” the association said in the release.

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The study also found that health risks “decrease immediately” after a person quits smoking and continue to decrease significantly over time.

Over 10 years, former smokers saw major improvements, and after about 20 years, their risk was more than 80% lower than current smokers, but the damage takes a long time to completely fade.

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According to the AHA, “although quitting smoking significantly reduced smoking-related health risks in the first 10 years, it may take 30 years or more for health risks in people who have ever smoked to be comparable to those in people who have never smoked.”

The study did not test the effects of e-cigarettes, the researchers noted. (iStock)

Researchers say the lesson from this study is that the only safe level of smoking is to not smoke at all.

“Low-intensity smoking is associated with cardiovascular risk, and the main public health message for current smokers should be early cessation, rather than reducing the amount of smoking,” they wrote.

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The authors noted some limitations, namely that smoking habits were self-reported at the start of each study.

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“Smoking stigma could lead to underreporting of current smoking status, particularly among women, thereby affecting data accuracy,” the study said.

The researchers also did not include data on e-cigarettes or other tobacco products.