According to a researchers' report, if all states prohibited smoking in restaurants, workplaces and other public sites countrywide, the number of Americans having heart attacks would sink by over 18,000 within the initial year.

Lead Researcher, Dr. Mouaz Al-Mallah, Co-Director of Cardiac Imaging Research at Henry Ford Hospital, in Detroit observed that comprehensive smoking injunctions have been applied in certain states, but not in all states.

At present, 39 states have some kind of public smoking injunctions, with 26 prohibiting smoking in any closed public place, whilst 11 states have no interdicts at all.

Based on the result, Al-Mallah said that he would "encourage all states to institute a ban on smoking in public place to protect people from secondhand smoke. Authorities should do everything possible to prevent healthy individuals from being exposed to secondhand smoke, and one of the ways is by passing such laws".

Al-Mallah was slated to submit the results on Thursday at the American Heart Association's yearly Quality of Care and Outcomes Research conference in Washington, D. C.

For the study, the researchers observe statistics from 13 states, which do not have rules outlawing smoking in public sites.

The researchers discovered that in states with no smoking prohibitions, there were 169,043 hospitalizations for heart attack.