Stopping smoking: after how long does the cardiovascular risk decrease?

It’s never too late to quit smoking and the month of November, which marks tobacco-free monthcould be an ideal starting point. THE smoking causes numerous harmful effects on health, in particular by promoting the appearance of certain cancers, respiratory diseases, or even cardiovascular diseases, recalls the Health Insurance website. Indeed, tobacco remains one of the main factors of cardiovascular risk.

If a Canadian study published in February 2024 demonstrated that stopping smoking can have a beneficial impact on life expectancy whatever the agewhat about its influence on cardiovascular risk? This is what we tried to determine a study published on November 1, 2024 in the journal JAMA Network Open conducted with more than 5.3 million people in South Korea. Its objective was to answer the question: how long do you have to have stopped smoking to see your risk of cardiovascular disease decrease?

It would take 25 years for heavy smokers to see their cardiovascular risk drop to the level of non-smokers.

To answer this question, Korean researchers analyzed the medical records of millions of participants, the majority of whom were men, with an average age of 45.8 years. 15.8% of them smoked at the time of the study, 1.9% were former smokers and 82.2% had never smoked. The scientists followed them for about 4.2 years to study their smoking habits and the development of cardiovascular diseases, such as heart attacks, strokes (stroke), or even heart failure.

At the end of the study, the researchers highlighted a critical threshold of 8 “package-years” of smoking, that is to say the number of packs of cigarettes smoked per day multiplied by the number of years of smoking. This threshold would, for example, be reached by someone having smoked one pack per day for 8 years, or 2 packs per day for 4 years. According to them, smokers who have exceeded this figure will take on average 25 years after stopping smoking for their risk of cardiovascular disease to be identical to that of someone who has never smoked.

The ideal remains to never smoke or to stop as quickly as possible, emphasize the researchers

However, for smokers who stop smoking before reaching this threshold of 8 “pack-years”, the cardiovascular risk would decrease more quickly, until it becomes almost identical to that of a person who has never smoked 5 to 10 years after the shutdown.

According to the scientists of the study, the quantity of tobacco consumed before stopping and the duration of smoking cessation are therefore two important factors in measuring the subsequent risk of cardiovascular diseases. They emphasize that these results remind us that the best reflex is to never start smokingor to stop as early as possible (ideally before having accumulated 8 “pack-years”), in order to be able to benefit from the most significant health benefits.

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