Importance of smoking cessation for cardiovascular risk reduction

This editorial refers to ‘Smoking cessation, but not reduction, reduces cardiovascular disease incidence’, by S.-M. Jeong et al., https://doi.org/10.1093/eurheartj/ehab578. Nearly 60 years ago, the Framingham Heart Study first reported on the association between smoking and coronary heart disease on a population-based level.1,2 Since then, innumerable data have confirmed a strong, graded relationship of smoking, smoking duration, and number of cigarettes smoked per day with cardiovascular and non-cardiovascular morbidity and mortality risks. Although smoking prevalence has globally decreased by ∼25% from 1980 to 2012,3 at least 25% of the world’s male and 5% of the world’s female population are still actively smoking.4 Moreover, the smoking prevalence trends have in many places been shown to differ among young and old and rich and poor, which raises concerns for an expansion of the already unfavourable social gradients that exist in cardiovascular health. In particular, it is...