Daijiworld Media Network

New Delhi, May 19: A Chinese study suggests that smokers who have a stroke are much more likely to have another one if they do not quit or at least cut back. Smoking has long been linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and serious cardiac events like heart attacks and strokes.

But the new study sheds light on how smoking influences the risk of a second stroke in patients who already had one. Among the 3,069 stroke survivors in the study, 1,475, or 48 per cent, were current smokers and another nine per cent were former smokers.

According to a report in Reuters, among the current smokers, 908, or 62 per cent, managed to quit within a few months after their stroke. As expected, smokers had a higher risk of a second stroke than people who never smoked at all, even if they managed to quit after their first stroke. However, smokers who did quit after that first stroke were 29 per cent less likely to have a second one than people who kept smoking.

The study was not a controlled experiment designed to prove whether or how smoking causes repeat strokes. One limitation of the study is the potential for smokers to go through other lifestyle changes when they quit, like improving eating and exercise habits that contributed to a reduced stroke risk Dr Gelin Xu of Nanjing Medical University in Jiangsu, China and colleagues note in the Journal of the American Heart Association.