New York hospitals admitted nearly 4,000 fewer heart-attack patients in 2004, the year after the state implemented a ban on indoor smoking, the New York Times reported Sept. 28.

The state Department of Health said that such admissions were 8 percent lower than expected, saving the healthcare system an estimated $56.3 million.

Ursula Bauer, study author and director of New York's tobacco-control program, called the 2003 indoor-smoking ban "a public health intervention that hardly costs anything, so to accrue that kind of savings from an inexpensive intervention is really unparalleled."

Researchers looked at a decade's worth of data from hospitals in all 62 of New York's counties. The more than 250 hospitals studied admitted 462,396 people for heart attacks in 2004. They controlled for factors such as seasonal differences in heart-attack rates and improving health care to attribute the decline in hospital admissions to the ban.

The study was published online in the American Journal of Public Health.