The list of reasons why no one should take up smoking is endless, and a new study from the Annals of Internal Medicine, led by Dr. Eruna Pradham, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, should provide us with yet another such disincentive. After following nearly 40,000 women for about 13 years to determine if smoking increases the risk for peripheral artery disease (PAD) — a serious disorder caused by narrowing of the arteries in the legs — researchers found a strong dose response relationship with lifetime exposure to smoking: For former 10 pack-year smokers (a measurement of smoking calculated by multiplying the number of packs of cigarettes smoked per day by the number of years smoked), the risk of PAD increased 2.5 fold, which, as ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross points out, “is pretty scary.”
“Some young people who smoke think they can get away with it because they’ll quit down the road when they get married or have kids, but this study demonstrates that even for smokers who don’t smoke for that long, the adverse health consequences are sometimes irreversible,” points out ACSH’s Dr. Elizabeth Whelan.
“Indeed, it would seem that there is no safe level of smoking,” adds Dr. Ross.