NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The results of a new study confirm that cigarette smokers have stiffer arteries than nonsmokers but suggest these adverse vascular changes are reversible with smoking cessation, although it may take more than a decade off cigarettes to revert to the arterial health of those who never smoked.

Dr. Noor A. Jatoi and colleagues from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland compared differences in arterial stiffness using arterial pulse wave analysis among 554 patients ages 18 to 80 years with essential hypertension that had not been treated.

One hundred fifty were current smokers, 136 were ex-smokers and 268 were nonsmokers. Ex-smokers were further categorized into less than 1 year, greater than 1 year, or greater than 10 years off cigarettes.

Current and ex-smokers of only 1 year displayed significantly greater arterial stiffness than nonsmokers, the team reports in the March issue of Hypertension: Journal of the American Heart Association.

In ex-smokers, duration of smoking cessation correlated with improvements in arterial stiffness, with arterial stiffness parameters returning to nonsignificant levels after a decade of smoking cessation.

"Arterial stiffness is an independent predictor of events in hypertensive patients," Dr. Jatoi and colleagues note in their report. "Smoking cessation may help reduce cardiovascular events through amelioration in arterial stiffening even in long-term hypertensive smokers."

"Our results," they add, "are in agreement with published data reporting cardiovascular risk reduction with smoking cessation for periods ranging from 3 to 20 years."