10 really bad smoking diseases

Smoking cigarettes doesn’t kill everyone. If only it did! Instead, it makes people suffer. It causes some really terrible diseases and it makes people suffer gruesome fate at times. Let’s look at some of the most horrible diseases caused by smoking:

1.     Lung Cancer

Lung cancer kills more people than any other cancer does. Smoking cigarettes is the primary cause of lung cancers, responsible for more than 80 % deaths. Most people do not have a chance of surviving within 5 years of diagnosis.

2.     COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease)

COPD makes it hard to breathe. It is an obstructive lung disease. It leads to serious long-term disability. It leads to an early death. It is one of the most tiring diseases as it makes it difficult to be active, to play, and to climb stairs and slowly makes it exhausting or impossible to walk even short distance. It’s been known to cause people being stuck in homes and 80 % of all COPD diseases is a result of smoking cigarettes.

3.     Heart Disease

Heart is not aloof from the hazards of smoking. Your heart suffers from the blockages and narrowing of arteries, all thanks to smoking. This means your heart receives less blood and oxygen and also circulates less to your body. So if you don’t want to let your heart suffer, quitting smoking is a good idea to consider.

4.     Stroke

Due to the effect of smoking on your heart and your arteries, your body can suffer from a triggered stroke. Since your body is receiving less blood and the blood supply to brain may be temporarily blocked, your brain cells tend to get deprived of oxygen and start dying. A stroke can cause altered brain function, slurred speech, death or worse still paralysis. A life of dependency is what smoking can lead to.

5.     Asthma

A chronic lung disease, Asthma makes it difficult to let air move in and out of your lungs. It makes breathing very laborious and difficult. Cigarette smoke causes irritation in air passages and triggers severe and sudden asthma attacks. In fact, even passive smoking of cigarette smoke can trigger / cause Asthma.

6.     Reproductive Effects in Women

Smoking can cause the fertilized egg to implant elsewhere. It can cause serious complications in pregnancy and can also be life-threatening. Smoking can reduce fertility in women and makes it difficult for a smoking woman to get pregnant. Not just this, it can cause a lot of other reproductive complications.

7.     Low Birth-Weight and Premature Babies

Smoking in women affects not just them, but also their babies. Pregnant women can face a lot of complications due to smoking; however, they do not suffer alone. Smoking during pregnancy can cause premature child-birth. It can also cause a baby to be born with low birth-weight.  Babies born too small or too early usually develop teir own health complications and even have an increased risk of death.

8.     Diabetes

Smoking increases the probability of getting type 2 diabetes. In fact, smokers have a 30 – 40 % higher probability of getting type 2 diabetes. Further, diabetes doesn’t come alone. It usually comes with a conglomerate of more problems like heart and kidney diseases, complications like poor blood flow to legs and feet, nerve damage, blindness and possible gangrenes and amputations. Smoking can increase the risks of all such diseases by increasing the risk of the root caus – Diabetes.

9.     Age-Related Macular Degeneration, Blindness and Cataracts

Smoking can affect eyes. It can result in damaged eyes and vision loss. It also increases macular degeneration that is age-related. In fact smoking is one of the leading causes of blindness in senior citizens.

10.  Over 10 Other Types of Cancer, Including Cervix, Colon, Liver, Pancreas and Stomach Cancer

But of course, saying that smoking is the cause for cancer is an understatement. For all types of cancers, which are almost more than 10 smokers have an extraordinarily high propensity of suffering from cancers. It can cause not just the primary lung cancer but also enhance the development of secondary cancers of various types.

The Hazardous Effects of Smoking on the Human Body

Smoke is extremely hazardous to human body and health. As against most myths, there is absolutely no safe way of smoking. The cigar, the pipe, the hookah are all equally dangerous and cause all health risks linked to tobacco and its products.

Cigarettes are frankly a storehouse of 600 + chemicals, most of them harmful. When they burn however, this number increases to more than 7,000. At least 69 of them are known to cause cancers and irrelevant of how you consume tobacco a lot of these ingredients are found in the pipes, hookahs and cigars.

The smoke affects not just your lungs but various other organs. Coughing up incessantly is not even half of it to be honest. Nor is feeling breathless, tired, exhausted and being unable to get rid of that pigmentation around your fingers. The environment surrounding you is full of the smoke and the stale smell with carcinogens finding their way to the parts of your body which you never imagined were being affected.  

In order to understand this better, let’s look at the most common organs that get affected by smoking:

Lungs

Obvious! I’m getting this out of the way early only because it’s so obvious. As you inhale the smoke with your breath your lungs and respiratory tract are the first to get affected. Consider emphysema, COPD, bronchitis, asthma, lung cancer and the breathlessness. Sadly, damaged lung tissue never heals. So damaged once, damaged forever!

Skin

We take skin for granted. Always! It’s easy to forget it exists. And skin is damaged by smoking not just on a cosmetic level but also in terms of increased health risks. Skin gets affected not only in terms of toughening, wrinkles, coloring, stretch marks or baggy eyes, but also suffers from psyriasis, warts, skin cancer and poorer wound healing. Skin is our first line of defence and damaging its immunity is doubling the risk of infections of all sorts.

Uterus

Ecotopic pregnancy becomes common in women who smoke. Result the uterus is unable to hold the embryo leading not just to complicated pregnancies, but at times also life-threats to the mother. Failure in trying to get pregnant, lower fecundity rates and adverse reproductive outcomes are often not given enough thought when women smoke aggressively.

Penis

Men suffer from smoking as well, even in terms of reproductive and sexual health. Smoking is known to cause erectile dysfunctional disorders. Nicotine is known to reduce the durability and the quality of erectile functioning in men.

Eyes

Eyes suffer not just the bags under them, but also blindness, glaucoma, cataracts, macular degeneration related to age. Smoking can trigger type 2 diabetes, thus also leading to blindness, forms of cataract and dry eye syndrome. It’s not just the smoke in front of your eyes that affects you but also the effect it causes on your blood flow and the lack of oxygen, caused by smoking, in the blood stream.

Liver

Sure most liver cancers are secondary, but the fact is the smokers tend to suffer from liver cancers far more than non-smokers. Smokers who smoke when they drink are actually the most prone to liver damage, thanks to combined effect of all the poisons of the smoke with alcohol.
It is often difficult to digest and accept the side effects of an addictive habit. However, with support it’s easier. At CCF, support is just a click or aphone call away !

The effects of smoking on the respiratory system

As one inhales smoke, one takes in their body, substances that can damage one’s lungs. In time, the lungs are no more able to filter the toxins in the smoke. They lose their ability to filter the inhales air. Since coughing is not fully capable of removing all toxins, hence these poisonous components remain trapped in the lungs.


As the chemicals in the cigarette smoke interfere with the body’s method of air filtration; simultaneously the smoke also irritates the lungs and causes them to overproduce mucus. The tiny hair – like structures in the airway called cilia are also paralyzed. Since cilia are responsible for cleaning the airway, their paralysis causes the deposition of mucus as well as toxins, thus causing lung congestion.

The extra mucus over years causes high probability in smokers to suffer from chronic bronchitis and the 'smoker's cough'. Smokers thus damage their lungs and fall victim to a higher risk of colds, flu and respiratory infections.

Chronic Bronchitis causes the inflammation of the lining of the lung tubes. In time, such issues can actually develop into much aggravated COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary diseases). In a layman’s language, all diseases that lead to difficulty in breathing over a long term fall into this bracket. Of course, one cannot even dare forget the high risk of lung cancer.

Lung cancer is the most common form of cancer caused by smoking. Over 80% of lung cancer patients are attributed to smoking.

Similarly, chronic and long term exposure of the lungs to smoke destroys the normal structure of the human lungs. This includes the breaking down of air sacs, loss of the elasticity and thus collapse of the walls of the smaller passages within lungs.

The resultant loss of the lung tissue reduces the surface area that facilitates the transfer of oxygen to the blood from the air. The lung capacity decreases, and results into a condition called emphysema develops and the air sacs of the lungs are destroyed. As such emphysema is common in all long-term / regular smokers, but the severity usually depends on the number of cigarettes and the duration of addiction of individual smokers.

While the damage to the lung tissue is irreversible, emphysema can still be prevented by not smoking, ensuring all chest infections are properly treated and avoiding all irritants o lungs. However, withdrawal from tobacco products is often seen to cause temporary respiratory pain and congestion as the lungs start clearing out.

Similarly, cigarette smoke is also well – known to be a trigger of asthma. People that suffer from asthma, their air passages are inflamed and thus become very sensitive. Such people when exposed to cigarette smoke, suffer from an asthma attack as the sensitive airways narrow down and cause extreme shortage of breath.

Smoking affects not just the smoker themselves, but also people who are exposed to the secondhand smoke. The children whose parents are smokers, often suffer from asthma attacks, wheezing and coughing more than children of parents who don’t smoke. Such children also have a higher rate of pneumonia, ear infections and bronchitis.

Like all wise people, at Core Cancer Foundation, our experts believe that prevention is better than cure. We strongly recommend that you either don’t smoke at all or else quit at the earliest. After all, even you wouldn’t want to suffer

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Effects of Smoking on Integumentary, Reproductive and Digestive Systems

While it may not seem obvious, smoking can lead to a lot of hazardous effects on almost all organ systems of the human body.

Skin, Nails and Hair

To begin with, let's look at the effects of smoking on the skin, nails and hair. The skin for instance is one of the human organs which shows some of the very obvious signs of addction to smoking. The components in tobacco smoke are actually capable of changing the structure of your skin.

Smoke causes wrinkles, premature aging as well as skin discoloration. The fingernails as well as the skin close to the fingers can show yellow stains from long durations of holding cigarettes. A lot of times, yellow or brown stains can develop on the teeth of smokers. One of the major tell-tale signs of active as well as passive smoking is the smell of tobacco held by the human hair, long after putting out the cigarette or leaving the smoking area.

Sexuality and Reproductive System

Sexuality of the human beings is one of the very important aspects of human interaction. As we already know, smoking can cause restricted blood flow. It can thus cause erectile dysfunctioning (inability of a man to get an erection). Similarly it can cause early menopause in women who smoke. It also increases the risk of cervical cancer in women.

Both men and women smokers have a higher risk of infertility as well as difficulty in achieving orgasms. Smoking also leads to more complications in pregnancy. Some of these dire consequences may include premature babies, placental problems, or even miscarriage. 

It is not just active smoing that causes harful effects to pregnant mothers. Even second hand smoke can cause low birth weight in babies, if a pregnant mother is exposed to it. Not to say that the risk of low birth weight is far higher in the babies that are born to mothers who smoke during their pregnancy. Such babies can also suffer from birth defects, SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), ear infections and asthma attacks.

It’s not just the adults that suffer from hazards of smoking, but even newborns as well as unborn babies that suffer from the second hand smoke.

Gastro Vascular / Digestive System

 

Oral problems are frequently found in smokers. They are highly prone to multiple medical conditions of the oral cavity that can range from gingivitis (gum inflammation) or infection (periodontitis) to even the cancer of esophagus, larynx, throat or mouth. There’s an even higher probability of tooth loss, bad breath and tooth decay.

 

When it comes to cancers, it doesn’t stop at the oral / buccal cavity or the entrance of the gastro-intestinal tract. Smokers have an increased risk of pancreatic and kidney cancers too. Contrary to the popular belief, even cigar smokers who do not inhale have a higher risk of mouth cancer.

 

 

Smoking has an effect on insulin. It increases the chances of insulin resistance, thus causing an increased risk of type 2 diabetes. Smoker diabetics tend to develop complications at a faster rate. Smoking can also suppress appetite and thus causing malnutrition.

 

This month’s series of articles are intended to highlight upon how smoking causes not just the lungs and moth to be harmed but almost all organ systems of the human body. This is despite the fact that we haven’t even taken into account various other forms of tobacco consumption yet. At Core Cancer Foundation, we will continue to bring to you information regarding cancers, smoking, tobacco and how to stay safe. Do share your inputs with us!