Smoking kills around
114,000 people in the UK each year. Most people know that
smoking can cause lung cancer, but it can also cause many
other cancers and illnesses.Of these deaths, about 43 000
are from smoking-related cancers, 30 000 from
cardiovascular disease and 29 000 die slowly from
emphysema and other chronic lung diseases.
Cigarettes
damage your health?
Cigarettes contain
thousands of chemical compounds and toxic chemical
substances.
Most
damaging :
· tar, from
smoking a carcinogen (substance that causes
cancer)
· carbon monoxide
from smoking reduces oxygen in the body
· components of
the gas and smoking particulates cause chronic
lung disorders.
nicotine in cigarettes
is addictive and increases cholesterol levels in your
body
Damage :
The number of
cigarettes smoked, and whether the cigarette has a
filter, or how the tobacco has been prepared.
Research has shown
that smoking reduces life expectancy by seven to eight
years. Smoking affects how long you live. The
people who die every day as a result of smoking,
many are comparatively young smokers. The number of
people under the age of 70 who die from smoking and
smoking-related diseases exceeds the total figure for
deaths caused by breast cancer, AIDS, and traffic
accidents.
Major diseases
caused by smoking:
Cardiovasular
disease can take many forms depending on which blood
vessels are involved, and all of them are more common in
smokers. If the kidney arteries are affected, then
high blood pressure or kidney failure results.
Cardiovascular disease is the main cause of death
due to smoking. Smoking accelerates the hardening
and narrowing process in your arteries: it starts earlier
and blood clots are two to four times more
likely.
As well as
reducing your risk of getting a smoking illness, there
are other benefits to quitting smoking, your general
health improves, and even tiredness and headaches can be
linked to smoking. Stopping smoking is the single biggest
thing you can do to improve your health. Blockage to the
vascular supply to the legs may lead to gangrene and even
amputation. Smokers tend to develop coronary
thrombosis 10 years earlier than non-smokers, and
make up 9 out of 10 heart bypass patients. 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. 90% of lung
cancer cases are due to smoking.One in ten moderate
smokers and almost one in five heavy smokers (more
than 15 cigarettes a day) will die of lung cancer.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. For ex-smokers, it takes
approximately 15 years before the risk of lung cancer
drops to the same as that of a non-smoker.
