Health risks associated with smoking

14 Oct, 2018 - 00:10 0 Views

The Sunday Mail

Smoking harms nearly every organ of the body. Some of these harmful and negative effects are immediate and some develop over a long period of time.

Many smokers are failing to quit smoking because it is addictive. Nicotine from cigarettes is as addictive as heroin.

Nicotine addiction is hard to beat because it changes your brain. The brain develops extra nicotine receptors to accommodate the large doses of nicotine from tobacco.

When the brain stops getting the nicotine it’s used to, the result is nicotine withdrawal. You may feel anxious, irritable, and have strong cravings for nicotine.

Smoking and

cardiovascular disease

Smokers are at greater risk for diseases that affect the heart and blood vessels (cardiovascular disease). Smoking causes stroke and coronary heart disease, even people who smoke fewer than five cigarettes a day can have early signs of cardiovascular disease.

Smoking damages blood vessels and can make them thicken and grow narrower. This makes your heart beat faster and your blood pressure go up. Clots can also form, leading to strokes.

A stroke occurs when either a clot blocks the blood flow to part of your brain or blood vessel in or around your brain bursts. Blockages caused by smoking can also reduce blood flow to your legs and skin.

Smoking and respiratory diseases

Smokers’ lungs experience inflammation in the small airways and tissues of your lungs. This can make your chest feel tight or cause you to wheeze or feel short of breath. Continued inflammation builds up scar tissue, which leads to physical changes to your lungs and airways, thereby making breathing difficult.

Years of lung irritation can give you a chronic cough with mucus. Smoking destroys the tiny air sacs, or alveoli, in the lungs that allow oxygen exchange.

When you smoke, you are damaging some of those air sacs. Alveoli don’t grow back, so when you destroy them, you have permanently destroyed part of your lungs. When enough alveoli are destroyed, the disease emphysema develops.

Emphysema causes severe shortness of breath and can lead to death. Your airways are lined with tiny brush like hairs, called cilia. The cilia sweep out mucus and dirt so your lungs stay clear. Smoking temporarily paralyses and even kills cilia. This puts you at great risk for infection. When compared to non-smokers, smokers get more colds and respiratory infections.

Smoking and cancer

Your body is made up of cells that contain genetic material, or DNA, that acts as an “instruction manual” for cell growth and function. Every single puff of a cigarette causes damages to your DNA. When DNA is damaged, the “instruction manual” gets messed up, and the cell can begin growing out of control and create a cancer tumour.

Your body tries to repair the damage that smoking does to your DNA, but over time, smoking can wear down this repair system and lead to cancer (like lung cancer). One-third of all cancer deaths are caused by tobacco.

Other health risks of smoking

Smoking can make it harder for a woman to become pregnant. It can also affect her baby’s health before and after birth. It can also affect men’s sperm, which can reduce fertility and also increase risks for birth defects and miscarriage. Smoking affects the health of your teeth and gums and can cause tooth loss.

Smoking is a cause of type 2 diabetes mellitus and can make it harder to control. The risk of developing diabetes is 30–40 percent higher for active smokers than non-smokers. Smoking increases the risk of erectile dysfunction — the inability to get or keep and erection.

Reducing risks through quitting

Quitting smoking is the best thing a smoker can do for their own health. Quitting cuts cardiovascular risks. Just one year after quitting, your risk for a heart attack drops sharply. Within two to five years after quitting smoking, your risk for stroke may reduce to about that of a non-smoker.

If you quit smoking, your risks for cancers of the mouth, throat, oesophagus, and bladder drop by half within five years. Ten years after you quit smoking, your risk for lung cancer drops by half.

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