Smoking harms women more: Study

Kounteya Sinha, TNN Aug 12, 2011, 05.34am IST

NEW DELHI: This should come as a serious wake up call for female smokers. The risk of developing coronary heart disease is 25% higher for women smokers compared with men, according to a study published in the British medical journal `The Lancet' on Thursday.
The authors say this could be due to the physiological differences between the sexes with cigarette smoke toxins having a more potent effect on women.
In India, more and more women are now taking to smoking. According to the Tobacco Atlas, the country ranks third in the top 20 female smoking populations across the globe. With around a crore female smokers in India, only the US with 2.3 crore female smokers and China with 1.3 crore female smokers, are worse off.

The study by Dr Rachel R Huxley from the University of Minnesota and Dr Mark Woodward from Johns Hopkins University involved a meta-analysis of around four million individuals and 67,000 coronary heart disease events from 86 studies.
The researchers found that the pooled adjusted female-to-male relative risk ratio (RRR) of smoking compared with not smoking for coronary heart disease (CHD) was 1.25 (25%) higher for women.
This RRR increased by 2% for every additional year of follow-up, meaning that the longer a woman smokes, the higher her risk of developing CHD becomes compared with a man who has smoked the same length of time.
The authors say: "The finding lends support to the idea of a pathophysiological basis for the sex difference. For example, women might extract a greater quantity of carcinogens and other toxic agents from the same number of cigarettes than men. This occurrence could explain why women who smoke have double the risk of lung cancer compared with their male counterparts."
Worldwide, there are 1.1 billion smokers, of whom a fifth are women.
Every year, more than 5 million deaths occur that are directly attributed to tobacco, with 1.5 million of these deaths occurring in women. These figures are projected to increase to 8 million female smokers and 2.5 million deaths in women by 2030 if present patterns of smoking persist.
In a linked comment, Dr Matthew Steliga from the University of Arkansas says: "What makes the realisation that women are at increased risk worrisome is that the tobacco industry views women as its growth market."
Cigarette smoking is one of the main causes of coronary heart disease worldwide. By 2030, coronary heart disease will be the main cause of death globally, and will be responsible for 9.6 million deaths — or 14% of the total every year. The linked comment added, "In most societies smoking rates are higher for men than for women, but more men than women are giving up, and in some societies the number of female smokers is rising. With billions of pounds to spend on marketing -- by contrast with paltry funding for tobacco control -- the tobacco industry continues to see a rise in profits globally. Thus, despite some success in reduction of smoking prevalence in men, the rise or even stabilisation of smoking in women will unfortunately result in substantial, preventable coronary heart disease morbidity and mortality."