Hi folks,
I am trying to convince a friend of mine in Taiwan to stop smoking because they have heart problems. Can someone lead me to some reputable news articles in Chinese about smoking and heart disease?
Thanks!
Can’t help you with Chinese info, but here’s a cool little calculator that shows heart risk. You plug in your age, sex, HLD and total cholesterol level, blood pressure, and whether or not you smoke and it tells you how likely you are to have a heart attack in the next 10 years. Have your friend do it with and without smoking to give him(?) an idea of how much smoking contributes to the risk. If you don’t know the cholesterol info, you could just plug in some fake numbers like 200 for total cholesterol and 40 for HDL, and maybe 120 for blood pressure. These are fairly “normal” levels.
hin.nhlbi.nih.gov/atpiii/calcula … ertype=pub
Below is a link to the executive summary of the Third Report of the Expert Panel on Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Cholesterol in Adults (Adult Treatment Panel III) by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (part of the NIH). The appendix goes into the details of how the 10-year risk of cardiovascular disease is calculated, and it really highlights how much of an impact smoking can have. For example, if you’re young and have good blood pressure and cholesterol levels then smoking might raise your risk from <1% to 5%. If you are older or have other risk factors then smoking might raise your risk from say 6% to 20%. Interestingly, smoking seems to has the greatest effect in younger people–at least according to the risk calculator.
Thanks for the links Jeff! That calculator is cool! It’s too bad I don’t know there cholesterol and blood pressure, but I’ll see if I can get it or like you said let them do it alone. Maybe the results will shock them, hope so! Thanks!