Quit smoking: benefits accrue fast

Press, 21 May 1987, Page 17

Quit smoking: benefits accrue fast

“Bodywork”

by

PORTER SHIMER

If you’re a smoker looking for all the help you can get to give up, be helped by this: researchers reporting in the “New Enland Journal of Medicine” say that risks of heart attack in people who stop decrease within a few years to levels similar to those of people

who have never smoked at all.

"The evidence from this and earlier studies provides strong support for the surgeon general’s new message on cigarette packages, which says, ‘Quitting smoking now greatly reduces serious risk to your health’,’’ con-

eluded the Boston University researchers in their report. “The adverse effect of smoking on the risk of myocardial infarction (heart attack) is rapidly reversible.” Better still was the finding that this reversibility appears to depend very little on how long — or how feverishly — one has smoked. When it comes to cigarettes, the heart appears very forgiving.

Bulimia not only

for women Self-induced vomiting or laxative abuse following episodes of extreme gorging has been thought to be primarily a female problem. Researchers from Harvard Medical School now say that as many as 100,000 men (roughly 10 per cent of the bulimic population) may suffer from the disorder.

Men have been' more secretive about the problem (mainly for fear of admitting to what historically has been viewed as

a “woman’s disease”). Researchers report that this secrecy has in no way minimised bulimia’s adverse effects: Erosion of tooth enamel, swelling of oral tissue, and profound depression can all occur with equal severity in male bulimics. The most effective treatment for bulimia — male or female — has been found to be through anti-depressant drugs, the Harvard psychiatrists report Copyright, Universal Press Syndicate.