Smoking and myocardial infarction.

In a representative series of male patients with primary myocardial infarction the prevalence of smokers prior to infarction was higher than in representative population samples. The difference decreased with increasing age, Those patients generally had a somewhat more severe clinical course than those who continued to smoke. Nevertheless, those who stopped had only half the rate of non-fatal recurrences (P smaller than 0.01) and half the cardiovascular mortality-rate (P smaller than 0.05) of those who continued to smoke.