Women at Higher Risk of Developing Heart Disease from Smoking

A startling study published Thursday has found that it is, in fact, more dangerous for women to smoke than men. The study revealed that women who smoke have a 25% higher risk of heart disease than men who smoke. It also determined that the longer they smoke, the bigger the risk becomes, increasing 2 percent a year for each additional year she smokes, in comparison to men who smoke for the same number of years.

The British Heart Foundation calls the study's results "alarming," particularly because, according to BBC News, women tend to smoke fewer cigarettes than men.

It’s suggested in the online version of the Lancet journal that the physiological differences between men and women may play a role in the increased risk of heart disease in women who smoke for different reasons, like stress. It’s also suggested that women may be more strongly affected by the cancer-causing chemicals.

According to study authors, Dr. Rachel Huxley of the University of Minnesota and Dr. Mark Woodward of Johns Hopkins University, “Women might extract a greater quantity of carcinogens and other toxic agents from the same number of cigarettes than men, this occurrence could explain why women who smoke have double the risk of lung cancer compared with their male counterparts.”

Researchers reviewed studies published between 1966 and 2010 that measured smoking and heart risk in men and women. These studies found 75 data sets covering 2.4 million participants where researchers had analyzed three things that met criteria: “(1) they had measured Relative Risk (RR) of coronary heart disease for men and women separately, (2) examined how it varied with current smoking compared with not smoking, and (3) adjusted for cardiovascular risk factors other than coronary heart disease.”

Results were expressed in RRRs: Relative Risk Ratios, which is the risk of a smoker developing heart disease in comparison to a non-smoker. By comparing results for men and women, researchers then calculated ratios to express how being a smoker varies between sexes.

Medicalnewstoday.com posted the study’s findings:

• The pooled, adjusted RRR of smoking compared with not smoking for coronary heart disease was 1.25 (95% CI ranged from 1·12 to 1·39, p<0·0001) for women relative to men, that is the women smokers showed a 25% higher chance of developing heart disease than their male smoking counterparts.
• These figures were unchanged when they adjusted for publication bias and there was also little evidence that differences between studies (study-to-study hetergeneity, p=0.21) would be important enough to change the figures.
• The increased Relative Risk among women went up by another 2% per year of follow-up, suggesting that the longer a woman smokes, the higher her risk of developing heart disease becomes, compared to a man who has smoked for the same number of years.

Even after concluding the study, it was still not clear whether the risk of coronary heart disease is higher in women than men because of biology or if it’s caused from differences in smoking behavior.

"Tobacco-control programs should consider women, particularly in those countries where smoking among young women is increasing in prevalence," researchers stated.