ONE CIG IS DEADLYSmoking one cigarette in your 20s can send heart attack risk soaring, researchers claim. Just one fag's fumes can stiffen arteries by 25 per cent, restricting blood flow and damaging the heart.
How many readers will interpret this as a clear warning that smoking just one cigarette in your youth makes your heart attack risk "soar"? How many readers will then think one of the following:
(1) They might as well keep on smoking if they've started. The damage has been done.
(2) People in their 20s have heart attacks as a result of smoking.
(3) The Sun doesn't know what its talking about.
Only one of these statements is correct. See if you can guess which one.
As per usual, the "research" in question has not been published but it appears to confirm the less-than-earth-shattering fact that smoking increases arterial stiffness. The press release which The Sun reworded gives us enough of the facts for us to see that its news report is tremendously misleading. What the research actually says is:
The study compared the arterial stiffness of young smokers -- five to six cigarettes a day -- to non-smokers. Arterial measurements were taken in the radial artery in the wrist, the carotid artery in the neck and in the femoral artery in the groin, at rest and after exercise.
Clearly then, this was a study of regular smokers, not of people who had just one cigarette in a lifetime. The readings were taken after the participants smoked one cigarette, but that's hardly the same thing.
So what are the implications of this unpublished research? As the lead researcher says:
Ho-hum. This isn't particularly news-worthy information, which explains why most newspapers haven't reported it. Maybe if the study had shown that "smoking one cigarette in your 20s can send heart attack risk soaring" other journalists would have picked up on it.
"In effect, this means that even light smoking in otherwise young healthy people can damage the arteries, compromising the ability of their bodies to cope with physical stress, such as climbing a set of stairs, or catching a bus," Daskalopoulou said.
Ho-hum. This isn't particularly news-worthy information, which explains why most newspapers haven't reported it. Maybe if the study had shown that "smoking one cigarette in your 20s can send heart attack risk soaring" other journalists would have picked up on it.
But it didn't.
[The article has been substantially rewritten in The Sun's online edition, with a slightly less hysterical headline and with some of the more blatant mistakes removed (including the whole first paragraph).]
