Why should I stop smoking if I already have heart disease?
Heart disease has a variety of diagnoses. One that's most common is coronary disease, meaning that not enough blood supply gets to the heart muscle. Why should you quit smoking if you're having trouble with the little arteries supplying enough oxygen and blood to your heart muscle? It's because smoking robs your body of oxygen. Your carbon monoxide levels that are high adhere many times more tightly to your haemoglobin than oxygen does. If you want to prevent a second heart attack, maybe the lethal heart attack, you want to give your heart enough oxygen and blood supply. Nicotine is a vaso constrictor, so it clamps down on the arteries so that there's not enough blood flowing to the muscles in the heart with every cigarette, and in between cigarettes those little blood vessels try and open up again. We know that second-hand smoke increases the risk of a heart attack and direct cigarette smoking, at the time of smoking, releases chemicals in the heart that put you at risk for an irregular heartbeat death and a lack of oxygen and lack of blood flow death. I would encourage someone with heart disease to talk to their cardiologist, their heart specialist, their primary care doctor, and say, "Is there evidence? I heard that there was evidence that if I quit smoking, the likelihood of having a second heart attack is rapidly diminished, is that true? Yes. The answer is true, but I'm asking you to verify it with your own doctor.
