The number of heart attacks among nonsmokers in Monroe County declined by more than two-thirds in the months after a countywide smoking ban took effect, showed a study led by Indiana University professors.

According to the researchers, smoking bans can quickly lead to a considerably improvement in nonsmokers’ health. They based their theory on the fact that the findings in Monroe County did not match the data in Delaware County, which has similar demographics but no restriction to smoking.

"This provides really solid evidence of the benefit of the public smoking ban, and hopefully this will provide a basis for adopting a public smoking ban in many municipalities and states," said Dong-Chul Seo, an assistant professor in IU's Department of Applied Health Science and the study's lead author.

The authorities in Monroe County forbid workplace smoking or smoking in any indoor public place, except for some bars.

The study involved only nonsmokers with no previous risk factors for cardiac disease.

The authors of the study said there was a 70 percent drop in the number of hospital admissions for heart attacks among non-smoking patients in Monroe County, compared to only an 11 percent drop in Delaware County.

Some researchers say that smoking bans might quickly improve the health of nonsmokers, while others say that it is tough to draw conclusion based only on one variable.

"There could be other factors that are kind of hidden that are really driving the difference that's being seen across these counties. You can certainly from these data say that there's a difference between these two counties. But you have a harder time concluding that the only reason these two counties differ is because of the smoking ban," said Bruce Craig, director of Purdue University's statistical consulting group.

However, the researchers’ conclusions match the conclusions of other studies, which discovered that the number of heart attacks decreased due to cigarette bans or smoking cessation.

Dr. Stephen J. Jay, a professor of medicine and public health at the Indiana University School of Medicine explained that substances in smoke, entering the bloodstream, could contribute to blockages and further more to heart attacks or strokes.

"What people don't understand is that if you look at active smoking as well as passive smoking in population studies, you can see that exposure to smoke, active or passive, is perfectly capable of killing you now," Jay said.

The American Institutes for Research and Indiana Tobacco Prevention and Cessation funded the study published in the current issue of the Journal of drug Education.