All tobacco, be it smoking, chewing or inhaling second-hand smoke, increase the risk of heart attack, as reiterated by a major Canadian-led global study.

The study found that tobacco use in any form (including sheesha smoking popular in the Middle East and beedie smoking common in South Asia) is harmful and smokers have a three-fold increased risk of a heart attack.

In this study, the following was found:

Each cigarette smoked per day, increased the risk by 5.6 per cent.

The risk of heart attack decreased with time after stopping smoking.

Moderate and heavy smokers of 20 or more cigarettes a day still had an excess risk of around 22 per cent, 20 years after quitting.

This study, by professors Salim Yusuf and Koon Teo of the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine at McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences in Hamilton, is published in this week's issue of The Lancet.

Read more at Science Daily.

On a personal note:

We are always reminded that it's not too late to quit smoking. Science keeps on telling us time and again that tobacco and smoking is bad for the health.

Gosh, that very fact is even written in any cigarette pack anywhere in the world: CIGARETTE SMOKING IS DANGEROUS TO YOUR HEALTH.

But we still do smoke.

I guess most of us have been hooked in those addictive puffs at one point in our lives for various reasons imaginable, and it is too difficult to get away.

But anyone can break away from the bondage of smoking if put your mind, heart and soul into it. Believe me. I did and have been smoke-free for months now. Contrary to previous times I tried to quit, I am not counting the days this time because it's going to be for the rest of my life.

Ironic but true, I tried to light a stick after a week of not doing so this time and I didn't like it, not one bit. I, who have been heavily smoking since I was 18.

What I am saying really is: it isn't too late to quit and that it can be done.