Heart Attack Risk High With One Cigarette A Day

PARIS: Just one cigarette a day carries nearly half the risk for heart attack and stroke as smoking a full pack of 20, according to a large-scale study published Thursday.

"If someone smokes one cigarette instead of 20 per day, intuitively we´d think that the risk drops to 1/20, or five percent," said lead author Allan Hackshaw, a professor at University College London, whose paper analysed 141 previous studies.

"This seems to be the case for lung cancer, but is not true for heart attacks and stroke, where one cigarette per day carries around 50 percent of the risk of a pack a day," he told AFP.

"This well conducted study confirms what epidemiologists have suspected but few among the public have," commented University of Oxford professor Paul Aveyard, who was not involved in the research.

"There is more reason to believe that lower cigarette consumption will reduce the risk of chronic lung disease and lung cancer, the other two big causes of early death from smoking," he said via Britain´s Science Media Centre.