SMOKING CIGARETTES HARMFULLY AFFECTS HEALTH

According to the American Cancer Society, smoking kills at least 400,000 people every year. For those who smoking does not kill, it still creates a higher risk of disease for everything from heart disease to cancer.

The Director of the ACR research Centre Pr. Chris Sherwood explains that the harmful health effects of smoking cigarettes presented in the list below only begin to convey the long term side effects of smoking.

Sherwood says “Quitting makes sense for many reasons but simply put: smoking is bad for health”.

Apart that smoking kills, Sherwood says that one in two lifetime smokers will die from their habit, that half of these deaths will occur in middle age and that Tobacco smoke also contributes to a number of cancers.

As Sherwood continues explaining smoking also has an effect on heart. Smokers have a much higher level of carbon monoxide (toxic gas) in their blood stream, and much less oxygen. This can affect heart as well as the overall circulatory system by increasing blood pressure and increasing the cholesterol levels, which leads to plaque building on arteries, depriving brain and muscles of the oxygen they need to function correctly.

He says that this can cause heart attacks and stroke and that it slows blood flow, cutting off oxygen to feet and hands. “Some smokers end up having their limbs amputated”, he adds.
However, 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.

Another effect of smoking is that it causes disease and is a slow way to die as Sherwood explains. He says that the strain of smoking effects on the body often causes years of suffering and sometimes Emphysema. This is an illness that slowly rots lungs. “People with emphysema often get bronchitis again and again, and suffer lung and heart failure”, he says, “it is very dangerous, trust me!”

Sherwood says that 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. The heart disease and strokes are also more common among smokers than non-smokers.

He enlightens that according to the ACS findings, Smoking causes around one in five deaths from heart disease and that in younger people, and three out of four deaths from heart disease are due to smoking.

In addition, he says that cigarette smoking during pregnancy increases the risk of low birth weight, prematurely, spontaneous abortion, and prenatal mortality in humans, which has been referred to as the fatal tobacco syndrome.

As conclusion, there’s hardly a part of the human body that's not affected by the chemicals in the cigarettes you smoke. The health effects of smoking have results which can be measured.

The ACS 2005 report says that forty percent of men who are heavy smokers will die before they reach retirement age, as compared to only 18 percent of non-smokers. But the good news is that when you quit smoking your body begins to repair itself. Ten years after you quit, your body has repaired most of the damage smoking caused. Those who wait until cancer or emphysema has set in aren't so lucky—these conditions are usually fatal.