But I remain slightly confused. I thought that the smoking ban was intended to address the prevalence of lung cancer and emphysema and other respiratory complaints. Why this focus on heart attacks? Does smoking cause heart attacks in smokers? or in non-smokers? And what has happened on the lung cancer front?
The Guardian does little to clarify the position:
Prof Gill added that the nine hospitals, in areas including Edinburgh, Glasgow, Paisley, Dundee and Lanarkshire, accounted for 63% of heart attack admissions in Scotland. The number of all heart attack admissions at these hospitals had fallen by more than 550, from 3,235 in the year to March 2006, to 2,684 in the year to March 2007. Among non-smokers, the reduction was from 1,630 to 1,306.
If you tease out these figures, you will find that the number of heart attack admissions declined by 19.9% in the case of non smokers but by only 11.0% in the case of smokers. So the improvement in the health of non-smokers has improved by considerably more than that of smokers. A reasonable argument for giving up fags, you might think, but what does it say about the smoking ban, as non-smokers are presumably the least affected by the ban? Unless you argue that the greater improvement in non-smokers' health is due to a lack of passive smoking - which seems highly improbable. Meanwhile, the health of smokers also improved (even if not as fast as that of non-smokers). That being so, if you wish to argue that the decline in heart attack admissions is a consequence of the smoking ban, then you should only count as a benefit the amount by which the improvement of the health of non-smokers exceeded that of smokers.
In any case, are not heart attacks a consequence of living and social conditions over a much longer period than simply a year?
3 comments:
Allow me to explain.
Put simply, fag smoke makes you platelets sticky - these are the blood cells that help you blood to clot. Sticky blood + coronary artery disease => Heart attack.
This is why the figures have declined more for non-smokers than smokers. The effect was entirely expected, hence the reason the research is being done now.
Any effects on lung cancer will take about 20 yrs, sorry.
I wouldn't deny that passive smoking causes heart attacks but it is simply not credible to suggest that there has been a reduction as high as 17% in heart attacks because of the smoking ban. Someone needs to look at this in greater detail to examine e.g bias in the sample of hospitals, changes in hospital catchments, other factors contributing to the decline
There is a bias in the study; the 9 hospitals studied cover the areas where the effect is most likely to be seen - the urban conurbations. The effect is likely to be smaller in those not studied is likely to be smaller; the way the hospitals have been include magnifies the effect.
Larger effects have been seen elsewhere
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