It’s no secret that smoking is harmful to your health. Cigarettes contain nicotine, which is an addictive substance that makes it difficult to quit. However, there are many reasons and ways to kick the habit and give your heart and lungs a chance at optimal health.
The basics.
According to the CDC, smoking is the leading cause of preventable disease and contributes to over 400,000 deaths each year. About 37 million Americans are smokers and of those, 16 million live with a smoking-related disease. The good news is that smoking has been on a steady decline since the millennium and continues to decrease.
How it affects your overall health.
Smoking affects every part of your body. It’s not just the lungs that you have to worry about when you light one up. Every cigarette that you smoke puts you at risk for a slew of diseases and complications such as lung cancer, heart disease, stroke and more.
At a glance, smoking affects:
The Brain
When smoking, you put yourself at a 50% higher risk of having a stroke. This means that you double your chances of dying as the result of a stroke. On the less extreme end, smoking causes memory loss due to the reduction of oxygen that the brain gets. Finally, it triggers areas in your brain that causes it to become addicted to the nicotine that is found in them, making it hard to quit and prolonging the damage they cause to your body.
The Lungs
About 84% of lung cancer is caused by smoking. It also contributes to other complications which reduce the quality of life a person experiences and which can eventually lead to death. They include emphysema, asthma, COPD, chronic bronchitis and pneumonia.
The Skin
Because smoking reduces delivery of oxygen to the skin, premature signs of aging occur. This is also visible on a cellular level. A person is three times more likely to get wrinkles, discoloration and causes the formation of cellulite. The good news is that when you kick the habit, your complexion gets brighter, your skin gets tighter, and you’re preventing further damage from occurring.
The Heart
The heart’s job is to supply the entire body with oxygen using blood cells as the vehicle. The carbon monoxide in cigarette smoke reduces the amount of oxygen in your blood, making the heart work harder to pump oxygenated blood throughout the body. Combined with smoking-caused atheroma, or build-up of fatty tissue in the lining of the arteries, smoking can double your risk of a heart attack, stroke or angina.
The addictive substance in cigarettes, nicotine, stimulates the body to produce the hormone adrenaline. It is naturally produced in our bodies in response to stress or a dangerous situation where higher blood pressure is necessary. You may have heard of unbelievable instances where women lifted unimaginably heavy objects like cars off their children. That’s adrenaline making the heart beat faster, raising the blood pressure and getting oxygen to the muscles required in such feats of strength. However, that type of hard work is unnecessary for a heart to do every time a cigarette is consumed.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in America and adding cigarettes in the equation does not help your chances of beating the odds. After only a year of not smoking, your risk of cigarette-caused heart disease reduces by 50%.
How do I quit?
There are several options that smokers have to kick the habit. There are government programs available to quit smoking such as 1-800-quit-now, smokefree.gov, betobaccofree.gov and other resources which can be found here. Additionally, most universities have free smoking cessation programs which students can take advantage of.
The key is to keep trying, no matter how many times it takes. Every cigarette you don’t smoke is a cigarette that doesn’t affect your health.
Are you a smoker or have quit recently? Get your heart checked out by booking an appointment with North Suffolk Cardiology by calling today.