Smoking: Post-stroke death risk

If you've read this blog at all, chance are you know how I feel about smoking. It's deadly.

Now, it seems that after a stroke, stopping smoking can be an effective "medication." This article talks about  how smoking after a stroke triples the risk of death within a year:

After adjusting for a number of other factors, the researchers concluded that patients who resumed smoking were three times more likely to die than those who didn't begin smoking again.

The study was presented Tuesday at the European Society of Cardiology annual meeting in Munich.

"It is well established that smoking increases the risk of having a stroke," study author Furio Colivicchi, from San Filippo Neri Hospital in Rome, said in a society news release. "Quitting smoking after an acute ischemic stroke may be more effective than any medication in reducing the risk of further adverse events. However, on the other hand, our study shows that stroke patients resuming active smoking after leaving the hospital can raise their risk of dying by as much as threefold."

(Photo from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office on Women's Health)