Narrator: This is Science Today. You may have noticed that being
around second-hand smoke can irritate your nose and eyes and can
often lead to headaches, but are you aware of what happens to
your heart? Dr. Stan Glantz, a professor of medicine at the
University of California, San Francisco, explains how exposure
to the toxic chemicals in second-hand smoke increases your risk
for a heart attack.Glantz: A cigarette is like a little toxic
waste dump on fire. It puts into the air a huge number of toxic
chemicals. They very severely affect your blood and your blood
vessels. They activate blood platelets, which makes your blood
get sticky and stick to the walls of your arteries. And they
also inhibit the ability of your arteries to expand, when they
need to expand to get more blood to your heart and other parts
of your body. And both of these things increase your risk of a
heart attack. And these are effects that occur within minutes.
Narrator: Glantz recently published a study proving that
creating smoke-free env