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Excerpts from Secondhand Smoke, Firsthand Stroke

Minneapolis Star Tribune [08/20/99]

Here's another reason to stay away from the smoking section: Secondhand smoke can dramatically raise your risk of having a stroke. That's the finding of a study by New Zealand researchers. The researchers looked at the cases of 521 stroke patients in Auckland, New Zealand and compared them to 1,851 randomly selected healthy people. The subjects were matched by sex and age, and none was older than 74. Among the subjects, anyone who smoked at least one cigarette a day was considered a "smoker." People who had never smoked or quit smoking at least 10 years earlier were considered "non-smokers." Anyone, smoker or not, who lived with or worked in the same room as someone who regularly smoked in front of them for more than a year in the last 10 years was considered to have been exposed to secondhand smoke. The researchers found that when taken as a whole, members of the smokers' group were four times more likely to have a stroke than members of the nonsmokers' group as a whole. But when exposure to secondhand smoke was taken into consideration, the statistics changed significantly. When nonsmokers who had been exposed to secondhand smoke were removed from the equation, the smokers' comparative risk went up; they were now six times more likely to suffer a stroke. People who had quit smoking at least two years earlier initially appeared to have no greater stroke risk than people who had never smoked, but when nonsmokers exposed to secondhand smoke were excluded, those who had quit were twice as likely to suffer a stroke as the remaining nonsmokers. Within the nonsmoking group itself, those who were exposed to secondhand smoke had an 82 percent greater stroke risk than those who weren't. The researchers say their study shows that the health risk gap between smokers and non-smokers may be greatly underestimated, since secondhand smoke is usually not taken into account. Their findings were published in the British medical journal Tobacco Control.

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