Quit Cigarettes to Help Your Heart

The epidemiologic data, so studies of thousands of people followed over years suggests pretty strongly that if you stop smoking that within about a decade of quitting your tobacco use, your risk of heart disease starts to go back towards, but not quite equal to someone who never smoked, so that your risk does go down over time. It does serve you well to quit smoking. It's not as though you should become the fatalist and say well I've already smoked for 10 years, I made the mistake, I might as well continue to enjoy the nicotine. That would be an error in judgment, because if you quit now, 10 years from now your risks will be much, much lower.