Smoking one cigarette a day is as bad as having half a pack – so is vaping the answer?
Smoking just one cigarette a day carries the same risk as smoking 10 when it comes to heart disease and strokes. Also in the news: vaping could encourage youngsters to smoke cigarettes, but also helps adult quit smoking
Just a single 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.
“If someone smokes one cigarette instead of 20 per day, intuitively we’d think that the risk drops to one in 20, or five per cent,” says 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 per cent of the risk of a pack a day,” he says.
Smokers should not be fooled, in other words, into thinking that a few cigarettes a day – or even just one – carries little or no long-term harm.
“While it is great that smokers try to cut down – and they should be positively encouraged to do so – to get the big benefits on cardiovascular disease they need to quit completely,” he says.
The findings were published in the medical journal BMJ.