Pueblo, Colo., heart attacks down after city's law takes effect

A study of hospital admissions in Pueblo, Colo., before and after a comprehensive city-wide smoking ordinance was put into place, shows a significant drop in the number of heart attack patients once the law was passed. The finding backs up the results of a similar study done in Helena by a pair of local doctors in 2002 and published two years later.

Pueblo, a city of just over 100,000 people located 110 miles south of Denver, put a comprehensive smoking ordinance into effect in July 2003. The study covered 18 months before and 18 months after that date, and found that Pueblo's two primary hospitals admitted 27 percent fewer heart attack patients in the time after the ordinance.

That's similar to the results of a study done here by doctors Robert Shepard and Richard Sargent, which showed a 40-percent decrease in heart attacks during the six-month period in 2002 that Helena's all-encompassing ordinance was in effect. The number of heart attacks here rose to previous levels when a judge shelved Helena's law, the study showed.

The Helena study was published early last year in the British Medical Journal, though Sargent cautioned at the time that additional studies in bigger places were needed. Shepard said it was "heartwarming" to see a city larger than Helena find similar results.

"We have said all along that the science behind what we did was solid," he said. "We fully expect additional studies to be done and to replicate the dramatic difference we noticed."

Sargent said he was encouraged by the Pueblo study's duration.

"The thing I find best about it was that it held up for 18 months," he said. "It wasn't just a flash in the pan. It really made a difference in the long run, and that was great."

According to the Pueblo study, which was presented Monday at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions conference in Dallas, the city's two main hospitals admitted 399 heart attack patients in the 18 months before the ordinance, but just 291 in the year and a half following.

"We were very much aware of Helena's study and the importance of it," said Dr. Chris Nevin-Woods, director of the Pueblo City-County Health Department.

Nevin-Woods said that after Pueblo's city council-approved ordinance was upheld by citizens in a special election, it went into effect on July 1, 2003, just months after Helena's study was first announced.

"We saw that we had very similar characteristics to Helena," she said. "We're geographically isolated, and everybody with a heart attack goes to one of the two hospitals, so it made it easier for us to do this study."

Shepard said that except for some talks with their Colorado counterparts at the very outset of the Pueblo study, "We backed out. We wanted them to function completely independently. We didn't have any idea what they were going to find, and aside from some start-up stuff, we haven't had anything to do with it."

Smoking ordinances continue to gain traction across the U.S. Last week, voters in Washington state approved one of the strictest smoking laws in the country. Smoking is not only forbidden in bars restaurants and bowling alleys, but within 25 feet of the door of any doorway to a public building.

John Harrington can be reached at 447-4080 or helenair.com">john.harrington@helenair.com.