Smokers who quit smoking after having a serious heart attack have a lower chance of recurrent heart attacks and can live longer than those people who continued to smoke following an attack.

However, there are only a few known benefits of quitting among patients undergone heart attack left with a complication called left ventricular (LV) dysfunction. LV dysfunction is damage to the heart wherein there is a significantly reduced rate of blood-pumping efficiency in the heart’s main pumping chamber.

Moreover, Dr. Amil M. Shah, the lead researcher on the new study and a staff cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston said that it has been not clear whether the dysfunction could aggregate the heart benefits of quitting smoking.

Nonetheless in their analysis, Shah and his associates revealed that survivors of heart attack having LV dysfunction may help to benefit as much from quitting smoking as other patients suffering from heart attack do.

Among 2,231 patients with LV dysfunction, the researchers discovered that patients who quit smoking in the period of six months of their heart attack were less probable to die within the span of five years or undergo a recurrent heart attack than smokers who persisted to do the habit.

Meanwhile, of all the patients, 463 were already smokers at the time they suffered from heart attack yet quit six months later, and 268 continues to smoke within six months. Among people who have quit smoking, 15 percent of them died or undergone another heart attack by the conclusion of the study, which trailed the patients for up to five years.

In comparison among patients who were still smoking even after their primary onset of heart attack, the rate is 23 percent.

Furthermore, people who stopped smoking were about 30 percent less possibly to die, experience a heart attack or be brought to the hospital because of heart failure throughout the study period.