Cigars linked to disease of the heart.

Many cigar smokers believe they are protected from tobacco's nasty health effects because they don't inhale as much as cigarette smokers do. A new study dispels that myth.

Carlos Iribarren of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program's research division in Oakland, Calif., and his colleagues studied the number of deaths among 225 men who smoked only cigars and compared them to deaths among 14,200 men who had never smoked any form of tobacco.

The researchers found that regular cigar smokers had a 25 percent higher death rate overall than the nonsmokers. In addition, the cigar puffers faced twice the risk of dying from all forms of cancer and from certain diseases of the circulatory system, such as cardiomyopathy, a disorder of the heart muscle. Iribarren described the group's results last week at an American Heart Association meeting in Santa Fe, N.M.

Iribarren speculates that toxic chemicals in cigar smoke may pass through the lining of the inner mouth and into the bloodstream. There, the toxins; may damage the blood vessels or the heart. While other studies have linked cigar smoking to cancer, this is one of the first to link stogies and cardiovascular disease. "This finding needs to be confirmed," Iribarren notes.