It came to be called the “Helena heart miracle.”

In the city of Helena, Mont., two doctors published a now-famous 2002 study showing that hospital admissions for heart attacks dropped dramatically after a city smoking ban took effect. Some criticized the study as rushed, superficial, and too good to be true, but the authors stand by the study and say it has implications for Lawrence.

“In a college town like Lawrence, Kansas, they’re intelligent enough to read that study and understand it. I hope they would,” said Helena cardiologist Richard Sargent, one of the authors. “Did it happen in Lawrence? I don’t know, but I hope you’ll look.”

That might not be so easy, given that Lawrence Memorial Hospital opened a new cardiac center shortly after the city’s smoking ban took effect in July. Since then, the hospital has been promoting itself as a destination for people with heart problems, and the number of people treated there for chest pains is on the rise.

Since the ban took effect, 1,100 people have been admitted to LMH for chest pains. Between July 2003 and April 2004, before the ban took place, 937 people were admitted.

“I don’t believe the numbers are going to give you a good, accurate picture,” LMH spokeswoman Belinda Rehmer said.

The Helena study, published last year in the British Medical Journal (www.bmj.com), studied hospital admissions to the only local hospital when the ban was in effect from June 2002 to December 2002. The ban was repealed in December 2002 after a legal challenge filed by a group of Helena businesses. However, a new, statewide smoking ban will take effect in October in Montana.

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Sargent and two co-authors found that during Helena’s temporary ban, admissions for heart attacks were 40 percent lower than the average of people admitted in the same six-month periods in 1998 through 2001 and in 2003.

“It’s not like I massaged the numbers to make it work,” said Sargent, who travels around the country speaking about his results and who was in Omaha this week.

One of the biggest criticisms leveled against the study was that the doctors didn’t interview patients and didn’t take into account which were smokers and which were nonsmokers.

“It wasn’t really as comprehensive as you think it would be,” said Greg Straw, general manager of the Montana Nugget Casino in Helena, which sued the city about the ban and said he didn’t believe the study. “It was hard to tell who was having them (heart attacks) and who wasn’t.”

Michael Zabel, a Lawrence cardiologist, said he believed in the article’s bottom-line point: An absence of secondhand smoke can bring about widespread health benefits in a short time.

“I don’t believe the magnitude, to be honest,” he said. “I’d be very surprised if you could replicate a 40 percent reduction in cardiovascular problems with a community smoking ban. I think it would be more on the level of 5 to 10 percent.”