CASE News

February 15, 2007
Columbia Daily Tribune
Ban gets to heart of the matter
By Matthew LeBlanc

A Columbia/Boone County Board of Health member who helped craft the city's smoking ban said the measure might lead to a reduction in the number of heart attacks in Columbia.

David Sohl, who also helped write a tobacco-free policy last year at the University of Missouri-Columbia, has proposed a study to compare hospital admissions for heart attacks before and after the ban took effect in January.

Similar studies of no-smoking policies elsewhere show a significant drop in the number of admissions for heart attacks among people living and working in smoke-free cities after bans were imposed.

"I think this would provide additional justification on what a smoking ban can do," said Sohl, a management analyst for MU Health Care.

The local study would be based on first-of-its-kind research in Helena, Mont., after a ban on smoking in most public places was passed in 2002. Doctors found that heart-attack rates dropped by nearly 40 percent in the six months after the ban took effect.

Another study in Pueblo, Colo., found that rates dropped by 30 percent in an 18-month period after that city passed a smoke-free ordinance in 2003.

Sohl's study would document heart attack admissions at Boone Hospital Center and at University Hospital, likely based on customer billing information. It's unclear now how the study would be funded, and there would be no attempt to determine whether any of the patients were smokers or had been exposed to secondhand smoke.

Richard Sargent, a private-practice physician who co-authored the Helena study, said the number of heart attacks show only a correlation between passage of clean air laws and hospital admissions. However, he argued that it's unlikely the results were skewed by Helena residents' living healthier lives after the ban was enacted.

"This is a very real, a very well understood and a very well scientifically explained event," Sargent said yesterday in a presentation at the MU School of Nursing.

According to the American Heart Association, smoking can cause coronary heart disease, which can lead to heart attacks.

Dean Andersen, an MU health educator and a leading proponent of the city smoking ban, said the heart attack studies exemplify the positive effects that restrictive municipal smoking ordinances can achieve.

"Ordinances like these are the single most effective way of protecting workers’ health," he said.

Stephanie Browning, director of the Columbia/Boone County Health Department, said her agency could help compile data for the local study but probably would not contribute financially.

Sohl said he soon would begin discussing the study with hospital officials.