"Smoking is injurious to health"- this warning , printed in every cigarette carton ,had been a useless tool to bring down the habit of smoking in many. But now the fact that even a single cigarette is enough to do the necessary damage is proved by the researchers of North Carolina.
It is a well known fact that long term smoking has a significant risk towads the diseases such as heart attack , cancer etc.,. Dr. Firas A. Ghanem and colleagues at the Brody School of Medicine of East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, in a suspicion that smoking might affect the left ventricle of the heart ( an important chamber that pumps the blood to all parts of the body),also called LV diastolic dysfunction.The patient presents with shortness of breath.The reasearchers made their observation in a group of 27 subjects who did not have any evidence of heart disease.They were divided into two groups with one group left with smoking and the other with nicotine gums for 15 minutes.Doppler echocardiogram was done before and after the process , and was found that , in the cigarette group, there were differences in several measures of heart blood flow, but no changes were noted in the second group, before or after chewing nicotine gum.
In conclusion, immediately after smoking a single cigarette, LV diastolic function, as measured by Doppler echo, significantly worsens.
