The Nation - News from Feb. 19, 1988

A major government study has found the first conclusive evidence cigarette smoking greatly increases the risk of stroke, especially in women, but shows kicking the habit can reduce the danger to normal, researchers said. The 26-year study, involving more than 4,000 men and women ages 36 to 68, found that cigarette smoking increased the risk of the most common kind of stroke by 56% in men and 86% in women, regardless of their other risk factors. The researchers, reporting in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., also found that the more cigarettes the person smoked, the higher the risk. A person smoking more than 40 cigarettes a day had twice the excess risk of stroke as a person smoking fewer than 10.