Cardiovascular damage from smoking: a fact or belief?

A large series of epidemiological, clinical and pathological studies relate cigarette smoking to the development of cardiac damage. Both active and passive smoking seen to act negatively on the heart causing atherosclerotic coronary alterations, focal myocardial lesions and arrhythmias. Acute exposure to passive smoking impairs cardiac performance in healthy people and subjects who survived a first acute myocardial infarction. Several variables, which are due to type of smoking, subject and environment, may interfere with experimental results. When we standardize these variables, cardiac damage caused by cigarette smoking is an undoubted fact.