Smokers who quit the habit soon after being diagnosed with heart disease saw their odds for heart attack or death drop by almost half over the next five years, a new report found.
However, those who simply cut back on their smoking saw no risk reduction at all, the same study showed.
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“I like to tell my patients that it is never too soon or too late to stop smoking, though the sooner a patient stops, the better to lower cardiovascular risk. And it is not enough to reduce smoking," said study lead author Dr. Jules Mesnier, of the Hospital Bichat-Claude Bernard in Paris.
His team presented its findings Thursday in London at the annual meeting of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).
Smoking has long been a big risk factor for heart trouble, and many heart patients may believe it's too late to bother to quit.
Not so, found the new study, which tracked the health outcomes of more than 32,000 people diagnosed with heart disease over five years. Close to 15,000 had smoked at some point in their lives and just over 4,000 were current smokers.
About three-quarters of the former smokers who'd been smokers at the time their doctor told them they had heart disease made the decision to quit within a year of hearing that news.
If they did so, their odds for heart attack or heart-related death over the next five years fell by 44% compared to people who kept smoking, the research showed.
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“The first year after diagnosis was the crucial window for quitting. At the time of diagnosis, we should emphasize the importance of quitting and support patients in this challenge,” Mesnier said in an ESC news release.
Just cutting back on how many cigarettes you smoked each day made no difference to health outcomes, however. Those patients had no significant change in their risks for heart attack or death.
The study authors stressed it was still better to have never taken up smoking at all.
Compared to never-smokers, the odds for serious cardiac events rose by 8% for every added year spent smoking, and even among those who quit smoking the risk never fell so far as to equal the risk faced by folks who'd never smoked.
Quitting smoking is always a good idea, however, Mesnier said.
"Short, clear messages are needed for smokers at every medical intervention highlighting the need to quit," he said. "Telling patients they can cut their risk of a subsequent major event or death by half –- as we have shown here -– is a powerful message.”
Because these findings were presented at a medical meeting, they should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.