Health and Smoking

Researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., tracked 30,000 Iowa women, age 55 to 89, to investigate the influence of smoking. According to Dr. James R. Cerhan, an assistant professor of health sciences research, women who smoked 20 "pack-years" -- the equivalent of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for twenty years -- were twice as likely to develop rheumatoid arthritis than non-smokers.

The research further found that women who quit 10 years or longer before the beginning of the study were not at an increased risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis, regardless of how much they smoked. "This means we could prevent a fair number of cases of rheumatoid arthritis if we could get women to quit smoking," Cerhan said.

The results of the study were presented at this week's annual meeting of the American College of Rheumatology.

A 50-year study, unveiled at the recent annual meeting of the American Academy of Orthopedia Surgeons, was called the best evidence to date that smoking is related to back pain and degenerative disk disease.

In another study, researchers from the University of Toronto found that smokers were more likely to fail at a procedure used to repair weak bones. Thirty percent of smokers had problems with the procedure, called IIizarov reconstruction, compared to 8 percent of nonsmokers.

Doctors who perform the procedure require patients to stop smoking. Abstinence can improve outcomes by boosting blood flow to the healing bone, experts said.