CORONARY HEART DISEASE

Coronary Heart Disease

Coronary Heart Disease

Smoking is the leading cause of preventable diseases and premature deaths in United Kingdom. Smoking is widely known as a risk factor for coronary heart disease, and smoking cessation can delay the progress of the disease and decrease recurrent symptoms and mortality. Although smoking cessation has promising benefits to health, a proportion of coronary heart disease (CHD) patients still either cannot quit or quit and relapse. In UK, 29% to 86% of cardiac inpatients have persisted in their smoking behavior or relapsed after hospital discharge. The criterion for smoking cessation adopted by most studies has been one-week abstinence. If continuous abstinence over time, which is more closely associated with health improvement, were used as a criterion, the cessation rates would be much lower. (Cohen 2009)

To establish effective smoking cessation programs for those CHD patients desiring to quit smoking, we must understand what factors motivate and impede them.

Several popular theories, such as the health belief model, the theory of reasoned action and the theory of planned behavior, and social cognitive theory, have been applied to the study of smoking behaviors. Concepts emphasized in these theories primarily relate to individual cognitive processes, for example, motivation, outcome expectancies or benefits and cost of performing a behavior, and self-efficacy or perceived personal control. Only the theory of planned behavior explicitly includes social interaction. However, as the ecological model stresses (Cutlip 2002), behaviors are not only influenced by intrapersonal factors and social and cultural variables but are also significantly affected by the physical environment. In addition, these three levels of factors are not independent of each other but interact with each other.

Therefore, successful smoking cessation not only relies on an individual effort but also on positive social interaction and a supportive physical environment. The intrapersonal factors, such as cognitive process, smoking history, the degree of nicotine dependence and the impact of diseases, the social and cultural variables, such as significant others' support for the smoking cessation process and the contagion influence of network smokers, and the physical environment, such as smoking bans in workplace and at home, arc related to the smoking cessation process. Weaving personal, social and environmental factors together to determine smoking behaviors was proposed in the conceptual model present earlier. The following literature review summarizes the state of the sciencc in the research of smoking and cardiovascular disease and three groups of ...