Smoking ups heart disease risk in women

Women who smoke have a 25 per cent higher risk of developing heart disease than men smokers, scientists have warned.

Toxins in cigarette smoke appear to affect women more badly, and the risk takes into account that women tend to get through fewer cigarettes than men.

The findings by Dr Rachel Huxley, of the University of Minnesota, and Dr Mark Woodward, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore from a massive meta-analysis of 86 international studies involving 2.4million people add to evidence that women's health is worse affected by smoking, reports the Daily Mail.

Women smokers have double the risk of lung cancer compared with their male counterparts, and often suffer more aggressive forms of the disease.

The latest review looked at 75 sets of data, which included 67,000 coronary heart disease events such as heart attacks.

The risk ratio of smoking compared with not smoking for coronary heart disease was found to be 25 per cent higher in women than men.

This increased by 2 per cent for each additional year of follow-up, meaning that the longer a woman smokes, the higher her risk of developing heart disease becomes compared with a man who has smoked the same length of time.