Smoking is a bad habit that risks the health of your heart and blood vessels. The newest research shows, smoking increases a risk of having stroke, especially for those who smoke menthol-flavor for their cigarettes.
As reported in Achieves of Internal Medicine, researchers stated that people who smoked menthol-flavor cigarettes had bigger chances to suffer from stroke rather than of those who smoked non-menthol-flavor.
According to a study done by a Canadian researcher, risk of having stroke was prevalent to female menthol-flavor smokers and to those who were non-African race.
The study even suggested avoiding smoking menthol-flavor cigarettes in order to suppress the risk of having stroke. And the most important, all kinds of cigarettes should be avoided since they pose risks of disease.
“All are bad, everything has been said. From the perspective of reducing risk, the study suggested to keep away cigarettes at least the menthol-flavor.” Said Nicholas Vozoris, the medical clinic staff of St Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Canada.
In his study, Vozoris used information taken from life-style and health surveys which included 5,028 adult smokers. The surveys were committed between the years 2001 to 2008.
At general, there were 26 percent respondents who confided that they used to smoke menthol-flavor, and the rests smoked non-menthol flavor.
The expert suggested that menthol encouraged people to try smoking and it made difficult for them to quit, because the taste camouflaged the strong tobacco aroma.
Among the menthol-flavor smokers, there were 3.4 percent said that they’d suffered from stroke. Meanwhile, there were 2.7 percent of non-menthol-flavor smokers had a stroke.
After considering several factors such as genders, ethnic groups, and ages of smokers along with numbers of cigarettes which had been smoked, Vozoris concluded that menthol-flavor smokers were exposed to risk of having stroke twice higher than to those who smoked non-menthol-flavor. The differences were obvious to women and to those who were non-Afro-American.
Among the subjects, stroke was three times likely to be found among the menthol-flavor smokers. However, Vozoris said that the study was unable to confirm that the menthol-flavor cigarettes alone contributed to the incremental risks of having stroke, since there were other unmeasured differences between menthol-flavor and non-menthol-flavor smokers.
The study also suggested, menthol cigarettes were uncorrelated to the risk of hypertension, chronic respiratory disease, or even heart attack compared to regular cigarettes.
The President of American Heart Association (AHA) and The Director of Cardiology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Gordon Tomaselli considered that the study had shown the correlation between menthol-flavor smoking habit and the risk of stroke, but not correlated to hypertension.
According to Vozoris, it could be the menthol substance inside the smoke which had severe effect to blood vessels, mainly to those which supply oxygen to brain.
