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If you want to dramatically lower the odds that you'll die of heart disease, go live someplace where public smoking is banned. In a study of more than a million people, researchers found that even low levels of smoke from co-workers' cigarettes can substantially raise your risk of death from heart disease. While you're packing to move, look for a place without much pollution, because a second study involving more than 9 million people in 126 counties across the U.S. has shown a direct correlation between the amount of carbon monoxide in the air and daily admissions to emergency rooms for heart problems. Both studies are reported Monday in the American Heart Association's medical journal, Circulation. In the first study, Dr. C. Arden Pope III from Brigham Young University in Arden, Utah and colleagues analyzed data on roughly 1.2 million adults that had been collected over 25 years as part of a study by the American Cancer Society. "We've known for a long time that smoking exposes your lungs to massive amounts" of fine particulates and increases your risk of dying from heart disease, Pope told Reuters Health. Compared to active smoking, the dose of particulates to the lungs with passive smoking is "much, much smaller," he added. Even so, earlier studies have suggested surprisingly high rates of heart disease deaths from passive smoking, out of line with the much smaller dose of particulates. So, Pope said, he and his colleagues decided, "We're going to take the largest data set available" - from the American Cancer Society's Cancer Prevention Study II - "and look at the effects of different increments of exposure" to smoke and other pollutants on risk. They discovered, Pope said, that "the biggest increases in risk occur at lighter levels of exposure."
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