Passive Smoking's Aggressive Side

March 14, 2007 — -- There's nothing passive about passive smoking.

Also known as secondhand smoke or environmental tobacco smoke, passive smoking has been known for quite some time to be associated with a laundry list of serious health effects.

This includes heart disease, lung cancer, emphysema, asthma, upper respiratory infections, sudden infant death syndrome, worsening of diabetes and a number of other conditions.

Now, a new study has just uncovered one more risk: a second heart attack or serious heart event within a month after hospitalization for acute coronary syndrome.

Acute coronary syndrome is the newest term for current, unstable heart disease. It encompasses the spectrum ranging from severe and prolonged episodes of chest pain all the way up to a heart attack.

The new study, published in the March issue of the medical journal Heart, was carried out by Dr. Demosthenes Panagiotakos and colleagues at Harokopio University in Athens, Greece.

These researchers followed 2,172 consecutive patients admitted with acute coronary syndrome at six major hospitals in Greece. Their main goal was to see if secondhand smoke exposure influenced developing another episode of acute coronary syndrome during the month after their hospital discharge.

After adjusting for factors that can influence heart disease, such as age and cholesterol, the researchers found that secondhand smoke exposure increased the risk of a second episode of acute coronary syndrome overall by 61 percent.

Surprisingly, nonsmokers exposed to secondhand smoke did worse than the group as a whole -- their risk for a second heart event increased by 71 percent.

As could be predicted, diabetics exposed to secondhand smoke had the worst outcomes of all -- their risk increased by 150 percent, confirming the known dangerous heart effects of diabetes combined with tobacco exposure.

Almost one half of all serious heart disease events 30 days after these patients' discharge could be attributable to secondhand smoke.