British cardiologists about wastepipe use and heart disease
Baku, March 14 (AZERTAC). Could the smoking of sweet-smelling tobacco in a water pipe or shisha lead to an epidemic of heart disease?
The water pipe - or shisha - is loaded with sweet-smelling tobacco and usually shared. Water pipes have been around for years, particularly in the Middle East.
But now their popularity is growing, especially amongst teenagers and women - who believe them to be less harmful than cigarettes.
Because the average time spent inhaling smoke is much longer than a cigarette it`s thought that each episode of inhalation can be equivalent to 40 cigarettes.
At the European Society of Cardiology`s meeting at the Saudi Heart Association`s Annual Conference in Riyadh Professor Hani Najm suggested that water pipes are contributing to a time-bomb of heart disease in the Gulf States.
We already know that doctors who smoke are less likely to help their patients to quit smoking.
But do other aspects of our doctors’ health influence the way they care for us?
And now there is further evidence that the cultural heritage of the Middle East may present yet another growing risk factor in the region`s battle against heart disease. The waterpipe - also known as the hookah or shisha - is now said to be used by up to 34% of Middle Eastern adolescents. Despite a perception that the risk of the waterpipe may be less than those of cigarettes, a recent report suggests that its "harmful effects are similar to those of cigarettes", and that the waterpipe may offer "a bridge" to cigarette smoking.(1) The greatest prevalence of use - with up to 34% reported - is currently among adolescents and women.
A recent study from the Gulf Registry of Acute Coronary Events (GRACE), the region's largest, found that 38% of patients registered were cigarette smokers and 4.4% waterpipe smokers.(2) The study, which included 6,701 consecutive acute coronary patients in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen, found that the waterpipe smokers were older than the cigarette smokers and more likely to be female.
However, despite the relatively low rate of waterpipe smoking among the patients in this registry study, other studies report more widespread use throughout the region, and especially among the younger age groups. A study from 2004(3) found that 22% of men in two villages of Egypt reported current or past use of waterpipes, and the habit is increasingly evident even among student communities in the USA, Canada and Germany. The GRACE investigators said: "Although the prevalence of waterpipe smoking in the current registry was low (4.4%), with the current trend of popularity it is expected that physicians and specifically cardiologists across the globe can expect increasing number of their patients with Acute Coronary Syndromes to be waterpipe tobacco smokers."
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