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SAN ANTONIO, Mar 02 (Reuters Health) - Researchers reported Friday that cigarette smoking might promote the formation of blood clots, increasing the chance of a heart attack with every puff.
Smoking, even a single cigarette, "appears to increase the coagulability of blood. The blood becomes stickier than the blood of nonsmokers," said Dr. Giri Saytendra of the University of Connecticut School of Medicine in Hartford. "This means that clots are more likely to form and that the clots formed will be larger."
It is these clots that block the blood supply and cause heart attacks, Saytendra said at the American Heart Association's 41st Annual Conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention here.
He based his finding on a study of 902 patients who underwent emergency artery-clearing surgery. The study group included 348 smokers. In an attempt to establish some direct link between smoking and heart attacks, the smokers were asked about the time since their last cigarette.
In smokers, blood clots averaged 16.9 square millimeters compared to 13.7 square millimeters for nonsmokers, Saytendra said. He told Reuters Health that these larger clots were usually found in smokers who have smoked within the 6 hours before a heart attack.
"After 6 hours, this effect seems to wane, although with current smokers it is unusual to go for more than 6 hours without a cigarette," according to Dr. Murray Mittleman, a co-author from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. A year ago, Mittleman presented a study that suggested marijuana smoking could trigger heart attacks. He said it is easier to establish a direct "time from last puff" relationship for marijuana because "unlike cigarette smokers, marijuana users aren't smoking all the time."
He said, however, that with cigarettes or marijuana, "the very act of pulling smoke into the lungs may also be a trigger."
Saytendra said that the clot building effect of cigarettes was not related to the number of cigarettes smoked or to the years smoked. He said it is likely that this effect "may be present with the first cigarette smoked."
"The most important thing a person can do to avoid a heart attack is to quit smoking," Mittleman said in a statement from the American Heart Association. "There probably would be an immediate benefit."
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