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Smoking – health risks
By resa | December 3, 2009
You can eat five portions of fruit and veg a day and exercise regularly, but healthy behaviour means little if you continue to smoke.
The message that ’smoking is bad for you’ is an old one, so not everyone gives it their full attention. Below we list the health risks of smoking.
Why quit smoking?
Most people know that smoking can cause lung cancer, but it can also cause many other cancers and illnesses.
Smoking kills around 114,000 people in the UK each year.
Of these deaths, about 42,800 are from smoking-related cancers, 30,600 from cardiovascular disease and 29,100 die slowly from emphysema and other chronic lung diseases.
How do cigarettes damage health?
Cigarettes contain more than 4000 chemical compounds and at least 400 toxic substances.
When you inhale, a cigarette burns at 700°C at the tip and around 60°C in the core. This heat breaks down the tobacco to produce various toxins.
As a cigarette burns, the residues are concentrated towards the butt.
The products that are most damaging are:
- tar, a carcinogen (substance that causes cancer)
- nicotine is addictive and increases cholesterol levels in your body
- carbon monoxide reduces oxygen in the body
- components of the gas and particulate phases cause chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD).
The damage caused by smoking is influenced by:
- the number of cigarettes smoked
- whether the cigarette has a filter
- how the tobacco has been prepared.
Smoking affects how long you live
Research has shown that smoking reduces life expectancy by seven to eight years.
Of the 300 people who die every day in the UK as a result of smoking, many are comparatively young smokers.
The number of people under the age of 70 who die from smoking-related diseases exceeds the total figure for deaths caused by breast cancer, AIDS, traffic accidents and drug addiction.
Non-smokers and ex-smokers can also look forward to a healthier old age than smokers.
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.
Cardiovasular disease can take many forms depending on which blood vessels are involved, and all of them are more common in people who smoke.
- Coronary thrombosis: a blood clot in the arteries supplying the heart, which can lead to a heart attack. Around 30 per cent are caused by smoking.
- Cerebral thrombosis: the vessels to the brain can become blocked, which can lead to collapse, stroke and paralysis.
- If the kidney arteries are affected, then high blood pressure or kidney failure results.
- Blockage to the vascular supply to the legs may lead to gangrene and amputation.
Smokers tend to develop coronary thrombosis 10 years earlier than non-smokers, and make up 9 out of 10 heart bypass patients.
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.
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