CHARLOTTE, NC (WBTV) - The statewide smoking ban in bars and restaurants may have caused fewer people to suffer heart attacks in North Carolina.
A study just released by the North Carolina Division of Public Health shows visits to the emergency room for heart attacks dropped 21 percent after the smoking ban went into effect.
Heart attack ER visits dropped from 9,066 in 2008 to 7,669 in 2010.
The state is saying the smoking ban is the cause of the drop, but some doctors aren't as quick to link the smoking ban with the statistics.
"I think it would be hard to say for sure if the smoking ban caused the decrease in emergency room visits," said John Pasquini, MD, FACC. "There are a lot of factors that could be playing a role."
Dr. Pasquini is a cardiologist with Mid Carolina Cardiology and Presbyterian Cardiovascular Institute in Charlotte. He said it's difficult to tell how much of a role the smoking ban played in cutting down on ER visits without having more than a retroactive study focused on statistics.
However, he said nothing but good has emerged from the smoking ban when it comes to North Carolinians' health.
"The harder you make it for people to smoke, I think the easier it is for people to actually quit. I think it's clearly cut down on the use and there's no doubt that it reduced the secondhand smoke hugely," said Pasquini.
While the drop in heart attacks is good news, the decrease didn't happen for everyone. In fact, women in North Carolina experienced more heart attacks, not fewer.
91 more women had heart attacks in 2010 than in 2008. That's compared to 1,488 fewer heart attacks for men over the same two-year period.
Pasquini said he can only speculate as to why heart attacks didn't drop for women. He said one factor could be stress. It's becoming more common for women to take on many duties at once, sometimes having full time jobs in the workplace while simultaneously working full time as mothers.
Overall, he said the smoking ban has been a win-win situation for North Carolina's smokers and non smokers alike by reducing the amount of smoke in the air.
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