Smoking

Harmful Effects of Smoking

-One in two lifetime smokers will die from their habit. Half of these deaths will occur in middle age.

-Tobacco smoke also contributes to a number of cancers.

-The mixture of nicotine and carbon monoxide in each cigarette you smoke temporarily increases your heart rate and blood pressure, straining your heart and blood vessels.

-This can cause heart attacks and stroke. It slows your blood flow, cutting off oxygen to your feet and hands. Some smokers end up having their limbs amputated.

-Tar coats your lungs like soot in a chimney and causes cancer. A 20-a-day smoker breathes in up to a full cup (210 g) of tar in a year.

-Changing to low-tar cigarettes does not help because smokers usually take deeper puffs and hold the smoke in for longer, dragging the tar deeper into their lungs.

-Carbon monoxide robs your muscles, brain and body tissue of oxygen, making your whole body and especially your heart work harder. Over time, your airways swell up and let less air into your lungs.

-Smoking causes disease and is a slow way to die. The strain of smoking effects on the body often causes years of suffering. Emphysema is an illness that slowly rots your lungs. People with emphysema often get bronchitis again and again, and suffer lung and heart failure.

-Lung cancer from smoking is caused by the tar in tobacco smoke. Men who smoke are ten times more likely to die from lung cancer than non-smokers.

-Heart disease and strokes are also more common among smokers than non-smokers.

-Smoking causes fat deposits to narrow and block blood vessels which leads to heart attack.

-Smoking causes around one in five deaths from heart disease.

-In younger people, three out of four deaths from heart disease are due to smoking.

-Cigarette smoking during pregnancy increases the risk of low birth weight, prematurity, spontaneous abortion, and perinatal mortality in humans, which has been referred to as the fetal tobacco syndrome.


Major Diseases caused by Smoking

Cardiovascular disease

Cardiovascular disease is the main cause of death due to smoking.
Hardening of the arteries is a process that develops over years, when cholesterol and other fats deposit in the arteries, leaving them narrow, blocked or rigid. When the arteries narrow (atherosclerosis), blood clots are likely to form.

Smoking accelerates the hardening and narrowing process in your arteries: it starts earlier and blood clots are two to four times more likely.
Cardiovascular disease can take many forms depending on which blood vessels are involved, and all of them are more common in people who smoke.

Cancer

Smokers are more likely to get cancer than non-smokers. This is particularly true of lung cancer, throat cancer and mouth cancer, which hardly ever affect non-smokers.
The link between smoking and lung cancer is clear.
Ninety percent of lung cancer cases are due to smoking.
If no-one smoked, lung cancer would be a rare diagnosis - only 0.5 per cent of people who've never touched a cigarette develop lung cancer.
One in ten moderate smokers and almost one in five heavy smokers (more than 15 cigarettes a day) will die of lung cancer.
The more cigarettes you smoke in a day, and the longer you've smoked, the higher your risk of lung cancer. Similarly, the risk rises the deeper you inhale and the earlier in life you started smoking.
For ex-smokers, it takes approximately 15 years before the risk of lung cancer drops to the same as that of a non-smoker.
If you smoke, the risk of contracting mouth cancer is four times higher than for a non-smoker. Cancer can start in many areas of the mouth, with the most common being on or underneath the tongue, or on the lips.

COPD

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a collective term for a group of conditions that block airflow and make breathing more difficult, such as:

emphysema - breathlessness caused by damage to the air sacs (alveoli)
chronic bronchitis - coughing with a lot of mucus that continues for at least three months.

Smoking is the most common cause of COPD and is responsible for 80 per cent of cases.
It's estimated that 94 per cent of 20-a-day smokers have some emphysema when the lungs are examined after death, while more than 90 per cent of non-smokers have little or none.
COPD typically starts between the ages of 35 and 45 when lung function starts to decline anyway.

In smokers, the rate of decline in lung function can be three times the usual rate. As lung function declines, breathlessness begins.
As the condition progresses, severe breathing problems can require hospital care. The final stage is death from slow and progressive breathlessness.

Smoking and impotence

For men in their 30s and 40s, smoking increases the risk of erectile dysfunction (ED) by about 50 per cent.

Erection can't occur unless blood can flow freely into the penis, so these blood vessels have to be in good condition.
Smoking can damage the blood vessels and cause them to degenerate: nicotine narrows the arteries that lead to the penis, reducing blood flow and the pressure of blood in the penis.
This narrowing effect increases over time, so if you haven't got problems now, things could change later.
Erection problems in smokers may be an early warning signal that cigarettes are already damaging other areas of the body - such as the blood vessels that supply the heart.

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