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#### How Smoking Affects Your Body

While there are different substances that people smoke, the word smoking usually refers to cigarettes.

Cigarettes contain finely shredded tobacco leaves that have been rolled in a thin sheet of paper. The lighting of the cigarettes allows for smoke to be inhaled by the smoker. It has often been said that smoking is dangerous to one’s health.

In fact, tobacco companies always say this at the end of their commercials, “smokers are liable to die young”. Smoking also pollutes the environment. People inhaling this air as third hand smoke posing a threat to their health too.

It is usually advised to not expose yourself to smoking by staying at a reasonable distance from someone who is puffing the smoke into the air. It has been said that the biggest cause of preventable death in England is smoking.

About 80,000 people in this country lose their lives annually as a result of smoking. In USA, it accounts for more than 480,000 deaths annually. Smoking does a lot of ugly things to the body. It diminishes one’s health and puts you at risk to a lot of health problems.

### Effects of Smoking on the Body

Smoking affects a lot of organs in our body and human system negatively. The way it does this can be explained.

Blood Circulation:
When the smoke from the cigarette is ingested, it introduces poisons into the bloodstream.

This poisonous substance makes your blood thicker than it should be, increasing the likelihood of clot formation. It also increases your blood pressure as well as the rate at which your heart beats, so that your heart begins to work harder.

The poisons also make your arteries narrower, consequently reducing the amount of oxygenated blood flowing to your organs.

Heart:
Since it destroys blood circulation and over works your heart, smoking makes you susceptible to heart attacks, stroke, coronary heart disease, peripheral vascular disease and cerebrovascular disease.

Peripheral vascular disease occurs when your blood vessels are destroyed while cerebrovascular disease is a situation where the arteries that supply blood to your brain are destroyed.

The heart works faster and is strained by the carbon monoxide and nicotine from the cigarette, placing you at higher risk of developing a heart attack and a coronary heart disease twice as much as non-smokers.

This probability is reduced by half if you quit smoking for about a year, and back to normal just like non-smokers if you quit for 15 years.

Skin:
The substances in your body as a result of smoking causes cellulite, making you age faster and looking gray and old. You skin might look dull; your color would be pale and you will be more likely to get wrinkles on your face.

However, if the habit is stopped, further damages will be avoided.

Stomach:
Smoking increases the chances of developing stomach ulcers or cancer. Smoking weakens your lower end esophagus muscles and makes stomach acids travel in wrong directions back to your gullet. This is known as reflux.

Smoking also puts you at higher risk of developing kidney cancer.

Bones:
Smoking weakens your bones, making them brittle. This illness is known as osteoporosis and is more likely in women than men.

Brain:
The brain is highly affected by smoking. Smokers are very likely to develop stroke than non-smokers.

This happens when your blood vessel walls are weakened, causing the vessels to bulge. When they burst, it can cause subarachnoid hemorrhage, a type of stroke that could lead to brain damage and eventual death. Smoking can make you have a brain damage or disorder.

Lungs:
How smoking affects and destroys your lungs is a no brainer. Filling your lungs with cigarette smoke can cause cough, colds and asthma.

Pneumonia is very likely too. Lung cancer is also a risk of smoking. It causes a collection of diseases that can be classified as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

People suffering from COPD find it difficult to breathe because their lung tissue has been damaged and their airways are narrow.

See also: SignatureCare Emergency Center Named One of Houston’s Top Workplaces in 2018.

Fertility:
Smoking damages the blood vessels responsible for supplying blood to the penis, thus causing impotence in men.

It also reduces the likelihood of women to conceive and give birth. HPV infection in the body is difficult to get rid of if you are a smoker.

This can develop into cervical cancer. Pregnant women who smoke have increased chances of having a miscarriage, premature birth and still births.

One would wonder why people still practice this habit while knowing the dangers and potential health risks. The truth is, People who smoke cigarettes often do this as a result of addiction.

Like any other form of addiction, quitting is often painful and difficult for smokers. The nicotine content is what smokers are addicted to and continue to crave even if they make a decision to stop.

There are strategies available to help people who are addicted to smoking with quitting. Nicotine gum is useful for weaning smokers. A lot of smokers often find it difficult to quit abruptly.

People who have decided to quit one day and never try it again are usually advised to join support groups for smokers to encourage them and keep them from falling back to the habit.

It is good to try to help someone you know who smokes to stop, the likely health problems are to gross to ignore.

By SignatureCare ER | Jan 28th, 2018| Categories: Education, General, Health & Wellness, Safety Tips
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