Exposure to all kinds of tobacco, such as smoking it, chewing it and bubble pipes significantly raise a person’s chances of having a heart attack, say researchers from McMaster University, Ontario, Canada.

There are about 1.3 billion smokers in the world - more than four fifths of them live in developing countries. You can read about this study in the medical journal The Lancet.

This study, of 27,000 people in 52 countries, looked beyond just the harmful effects of simply smoking tobacco. It looked various ways of consuming tobacco, from smoking, chewing, second-hand smoke, to smoking it through a water pipe. They compared 12,400 patients who had had a heart attack to 14,000 who were healthy (never had a heart attack or cardiovascular disease).

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