“…Although 12 of 15 studies in which the effects of smoking cessation on vascular endothelial function was assessed by physiological methods including measurements of FMD and reactive hyperemia index (RHI) showed that smoking cessation improved FMD, RHI or vascular response to vasoactive agents [18,21,22,[25][26][27][28][29][32][33][34][35], three of those 15 studies showed no effects of smoking cessation on FMD or RHI [89][90][91]. In eight studies in which the effects of smoking cessation on endothelial function were assessed by biomarkers [19,20,23,24,30,31,92,93], five studies showed that smoking cessation increased or improved biomarkers for endothelial function including circulating levels of nitrate/nitrite, NO, vvWF, ICAM-1, EPCs and EMPs and activity of eNOS [19,23,24,30,31]. However, three of the eight studies showed no effects of smoking cessation on biomarkers for endothelial function [20,92,93].…”