Smoking and Female Health

This article shows the results of recent study about the effects of smoking on female health and it really gives you the motive to quite smoking if you didn't do that yet.

According to a recent study carried out by European researchers, female smoking is implicated with even more health hazards than was previously suspected. Norwegian scientists have revealed that smoking women have a higher incidence and earlier onset of heart disease in comparison with male smokers. The finding was published in the journal of the European Society of Cardiology.

Naturally, women suffer from cardiovascular disease less frequently than men, which can be explained by a heart-protective effect of the female hormone estrogen. However, due to estrogen-inhibiting qualities of nicotine, smoking females tend to secrete less of this beneficial hormone during their reproductive years. They are also likely to have an early menopause. These factors contribute to a documented vulnerability of female smokers to heart attacks and other cardiovascular problems. In addition, smoking women are likely to develop myocardial infarction a decade earlier than their non-smoking peers. In comparison, male smokers usually develop heart problems approximately six years earlier than non-smoking males.

In the study, researchers led by Dr. Morten Grundtvig examined health histories of almost 2,000 heart attack patients hospitalized in Lillehammer, Norway. The records showed that, at the average, non-smoking men suffered from their first heart attack at the age of 72, while non-smoking women had their first myocardial infarction at the age of 81. However, with smoking patients the situation was quite different: smoking men tended to have their first heart attack as early as at the age of 64, while smoking women – at the age of 66.

Italian cardiologist Silvia Priori says that women have to realize that they can suffer severe health consequences if they choose to smoke. Early heart attack is just one of them.