Do Smoking Bans Reduce Heart Attacks?
- “In contrast with smaller regional studies,” says a RAND Corporation study, “we find that smoking bans are not associated with statistically significant short-term declines in mortality or hospital admissions for myocardial infarction [heart attack] or other diseases.”
- In fact, “An analysis simulating smaller studies using subsamples reveals that large short-term increases in myocardial infarction incidence following a smoking ban are as common as the large decreases reported in the published literature.”
In other words, although heart attacks do decline in some places with smoking bans, there are just as many places where they rise. On average, the difference between jurisdictions with smoking bans and jurisdictions without smoking bans is essentially zero.
Interesting. And, unfortunately, probably necessary to combat silly legislation.
Is anyone surpirised by this result? If you are, I know of a Bridge in Brooklyn I’m willing to sell you.
I know I’m not surpised.
I always assumed smoking bans had more to do with non-smokers desire to force private business’ to cater to non-smokers preferences than any perceived health risks from second hand smoke.
We wrote a very detailed manuscript with state-specific heart attack data from the healthcare cost and utilization project, which is a very reliable DHHS database. We ran regressions on states’ data before and after the implementation of smoking bans. We also ran control states without smoking bans. Overall, there was no difference. We submitted the manuscript, after careful review by a leading public health policy professor at Boston University. Our manuscript was rejected by every journal which had previously published selective studies finding drastic and immediate heart attack declines after smoking bans.
David I know thats right. The nazis dont want their propaganda destroyed!