Heart Disease: Smoking and Heart Disease

The most important information you need to improve your health

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• Publisher: Adams Media
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781440548079
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Diseases & Allergies

Understanding heart disease is your first step in reversing or preventing a potentially life-threatening condition. The Everything® Healthy Living Series is here to help. These concise, thoughtful guides offer the expert advice and the latest medical information you need to manage your heart disease and lead a healthy life.It's well known that carcinogens in cigarette smoke can cause cancer, but they can be equally damaging to your heart. Inside you'll find useful information on the benefits of quitting, stop-smoking aids, and places to find help.

Smoking

Smoking cigarettes greatly increases your risk of having a heart attack or stroke. Chemicals such as nicotine in cigarettes damage the lining of blood vessels and worsen your cholesterol. The good news is that within minutes of your last cigarette, your body starts to change for the better.

The Truth

You’ve probably already heard that smoking is bad for you. But do you really know what it can do? Consider the following facts: Smokers have a tremendously higher risk of lung diseases such as cancer, emphysema, bronchitis, and pulmonary fibrosis. Ever see people who have to walk around strolling an oxygen tank so they can breathe? Nearly all of those people became that way due to smoking. Imagine becoming out of breath after going only a few steps. Performing other tasks that help your life, like exercise, become tremendously harder.

The Many Effects of Smoking

Smoking also gives you a higher risk of nearly every form of cancer. In a healthy body, many areas have cells that go through a cycle of reproduction, where older cells die and newer cells take over. In cancer, some of the new cells have a genetic error where they end up replicating too much or living too long. The body makes more and more cells, ultimately creating a mass that can spread to invade your brain, lungs, liver, and bones.

Fact

Smoking is the cause of more than 440,000 deaths per year, according to the American Heart Association. This number represents more than one out of every six deaths!

Hurts You on Its Own

When compared with nonsmokers, smokers have twice the risk of having a heart attack or stroke, and even higher risk when other risk factors are present. Furthermore, smokers who have a heart attack are much more likely to die. Smoking increases the risk of sudden cardiac death.

How Smoking Hurts Your Heart

The mechanisms that cause cardiovascular disease from smoking and its many other devastating effects are still being researched, and it’s for this reason that tobacco companies still often state there is no direct evidence showing how smoking causes so many diseases. Over the last several decades a huge amount of evidence emerged that linked smoking to many diseases, so much that even tobacco companies have begun to yield to all the research and admit that smoking causes health risks.

Fact

Smoking cigarettes is not only harmful to your lungs, it is also very damaging to the health of your heart and circulatory system. In fact, more smokers die from heart attacks and strokes than from lung cancer or respiratory disease.

It’s widely believed that when inhaled, the many harmful substances in cigarettes get into the bloodstream and cause damage to arterial walls. As we have seen with high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes, this damage then fosters the formation of atherosclerosis and plaque formation, which then leads to issues such as heart attacks and strokes. Since all of these risk factors cause damage to blood vessel walls, it is easy to see how having several risk factors significantly raises your risk of cardiovascular disease.

Also, smokers tend to have a lower concentration of oxygen in their blood. Therefore, organs such as the heart do not receive the same amount of oxygen they would from blood flow. This decreased oxygen in the tis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Smoking
• Also Available
• Copyright Page