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This is your heart on cigarettes. It's not a pretty sight.

Smoking just one cigarette makes the heart function abnormally, a high-tech imaging analysis of the heart, done at the University of Arizona, shows.

"We can actually see what's going on with the heart while a person is smoking," said UA radiologist Dr. Vincent Sorrell, an internationally known expert on cardiac imaging.

"What we found is that with just one puff of a cigarette, we see changes in the way the heart relaxes between contractions. It seems to stiffen — it does not have the vigorous motion it should have.

"And we know that failure to relax properly is an early marker for heart failure."

The new evidence likely will be seized upon by one of Tucson's major anti-smoking programs in its effort to help nearly 1,000 Tucsonans quit every year.

"This dramatically demonstrates how you damage over and over again the vital organs that keep the whole body going," said Karen Martin, who manages the Tobacco-Free Ways courses for the county health department.

"Our cessation people enjoy passing along the latest information on what smoking does to you. The smokers always say, 'Yeah, yeah, we've heard it all,' but this is new evidence they need to hear."

Although smoking long has been recognized as one of the greatest of all health threats, it is most often linked to lung disease, especially lung cancer and emphysema.

But smoking plays almost as great a role in heart damage and disease, and is a confirmed cause of heart attacks, strokes and hardening of the arteries.

What UA doctors now are seeing in smoking patients — using an ultrasound technique known as echocardiography with the latest computer imaging and statistical analysis — points to a new mechanism also possibly damaging the heart.

After hearing so many smoking patients complain of shortness of breath, yet getting normal tests results during their office visits, Sorrell decided to get a look at the heart during the actual act of smoking.

"I thought maybe there is something going on transiently while they are smoking, but later, at the doctor's office when they're not smoking, their hearts go back to normal," he said.

"I would just tell patients it's got to be the smoking that's making them short of breath and they have to quit. And they would say, 'Why should I? My tests are all good.' So we set up this study."

Using a volunteer group of 27 young, healthy adults, the research team had half the group smoke a regular filter cigarette and the other half chew nicotine gum. The entire group underwent heart ultrasound imaging twice — right before the smoking or chewing and immediately afterward.

While analyzing the heart function, Sorrell's team did not know if the images were of smokers or chewers.

What they saw was described as a slight but notable difference in the two groups. The heart's left ventricle did not fully relax in those who had just smoked one cigarette. No changes were detected in the gum chewers.

"As a result, the heart filled up with less blood than it normally does," Sorrell said. His theory is that this reduced flow leads to a backup of blood in the lungs, causing shortness of breath.

This abnormality — the stiffening of the relaxing heart —usually disappeared about 30 minutes after the act of smoking.

"But if you're smoking a cigarette 10 or 20 times a day, this is happening over and over. The thinking is, these are incremental changes in heart function that eventually add up to damage," he said.

"It makes sense, with this poison going into the body in place of oxygen and all its nutrients. I think you can add these results to the growing list of evidence that it doesn't take a lot of cigarettes to cause problems for the heart."

Damage to health is the No. 1 reason people try to quit smoking, followed closely by a workplace going smoke-free, and then fears of becoming a social pariah, said Martin, with Tobacco-Free Ways.