New Delhi: New research has revealed that chewing tobacco is more dangerous than smoking for the heart.
Doctors at Patna’s Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences (IGIMS) have now added chewing tobacco to the list of causes behind heart-related diseases. Among the others are high blood pressure, diabetes, blood cholesterol, smoking, obesity and stress.
The research was conducted on heart patients who chewed tobacco for the first time and also on those who took it thrice a day, Dainik Jagran reported.
An IGIMS team of top doctors studied patients from February 2015 to July 2016, and their work was featured in the 14th edition of the International Journal of Pharmaceutical and Clinical Research in 2022.
Rampant use of chewing tobacco (khaini) in India
The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare’s Global Adult Tobacco Survey 2 (GATS 2) in 2018 revealed that 28.6% of adults aged 15 and above used tobacco in some form or the other.
Among them, 24.9% used tobacco daily, while 3.7% used it occasionally.
‘Khaini’ — a mixture of slaked lime and dried tobacco — was found to be the most common, taken by 11.2% of adults. It was followed by ‘beedi’, smoked by 7.7% of the adult Indian population. ‘Gutkha’ and ‘paan’ came third and fourth.
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