• Posted September 13, 2024

A-Fib Risk Drops Soon After Quitting Smoking

Smokers who make the decision to quit will see almost immediate health benefits, including a quick drop in their risk for atrial fibrillation, new research shows.

“The findings provide a compelling new reason to show current smokers that it’s not too late to quit and that having smoked in the past doesn’t mean you’re ‘destined’ to develop A-Fib,” said study senior author Dr. Gregory Marcus.

“Even for the current and longtime smoker, A-Fib can still be avoided," said Marcus, a cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. His team published its findings Sept. 11 in JACC: Clinical Electrophysiology.

With A-Fib, the upper chambers of the heart, called the atria, start to beat irregularly. This allows blood to pool and potentially clot in the atria, increasing a person’s risk of stroke.

“There’s strong evidence that smoking increases the risk of A-Fib, but the benefits of quitting smoking have been less certain,” Marcus said. “We wanted to determine whether quitting smoking could lower a person’s risk of developing A-Fib or if the risk would stay the same.”

To find out, they looked at British data on over 146,700 current or former smokers whose smoking history and health was tracked for 12 years in the UK Biobank database.

Folks who were former smokers (before they joined the study) had a 13% lower odds for A-Fib than current smokers, and if the smoker quit during the study period their risk of A-Fib fell to 18% below that of current smokers, Marcus' team found.

“This is likely a testament to the potency of reducing atrial fibrillation risk pretty shortly after quitting,” Marcus said in a news release from the American College of Cardiology.

More information

Find out more about A-Fib at the American Heart Association.

SOURCE: American College of Cardiology, news release, Sept. 11, 2024