A study claims that smoking marijuana dramatically increases a person’s risk of suffering a heart attack or other cardiovascular event.

Over a five-year period, regular users as young as their early 30s were 4.6 times more likely to have a cardiac-related illness than those who did not smoke the drug. Scientists from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, noted that pot smokers tend to have higher blood pressure than nonusers and are more likely to drink heavily, smoke tobacco, and have Type 2 diabetes — all of which increase the risk of heart attacks.

“Even when we corrected for known risk factors, we still found a higher rate of both stroke and heart failure in those patients using the drug,” says Dr. Aditi Kalla, a cardiologist at Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia. “That leads us to believe that there is something else going on besides diet-related cardiovascular side effects.”

Researchers also found that marijuana use was independently associated with a 26 percent increased risk of stroke and a 10 percent increase in heart failure.