What Diseases Can You Get From Smoking?

What Diseases Can You Get From Smoking?

Around 438 thousand American citizens die every year from smoking related disease. Not everyone dies from the same disease because not everyone's body reacts in the same way to cigarette smoke. Unfortunately, there are many different ways in which your body could react to the smoking of cigarettes and because there are so many smokers worldwide, our hospitals are over run with people suffering from the results of a long term nicotine habit.

For some people the lungs are affected first. This may just feel like shortness of breath and a bad smoker's cough in the morning, but if cigarettes aren't ditched right there and then, a habit can lead to conditions like bronchitis and emphysema. Emphysema is a condition characterized by the pockets of air present in the lungs becoming severely damaged. It leads to decreased respiratory function and can even cause death. As well as emphysema and chronic cases of bronchitis we're sure you'll have heard that smoking can cause lung cancer. An incredible 90% of people who die from lung cancer were smokers, and that can't all be coincidence! Smoking related conditions that affect the lungs are known as COPD. While you may not have heard of that term, the full name is quite self explanatory: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. 'Pulmonary' simply means 'of the lungs' and the diseases included within it are emphysema and chronic bronchitis.

It's not only the lungs that develop cancer from smoking either. In fact, the mouth, throat, bladder, esophagus, stomach, pancreas and kidneys are all susceptible to cancer, and since smoking also causes slow healing, having cancerous tumors removed via surgery is extra risky.

The second worst affected organ from smoking after the lungs is the heart. Heavy smokers are far more likely to develop CHD (coronary heart disease) and aneurysms of the heart too. This is one of the best reasons to give up smoking as a huge percentage of people in the US die of heart conditions each year. Coronary heart disease is also a hereditary condition, meaning that if one or more of your relatives died early from CHD then you are automatically more predisposed to it. Instead of smoking, people with this kind of predisposition should be doing all they can to prevent it from happening.

Smokers are more susceptible to developing certain conditions. Take peptic ulcers for example; these are caused by a bacteria that live in 50% of the population's stomach. Only 1 in 8 of that population will develop an ulcer, but being a smoker means you have a far lower chance of making a speedy recovery. Speaking of speedy, smoking also speeds up the development of ulcers, so your condition will be more serious by the time you're treated. While there's no 100% guarantee that if you smoke, you will develop one of these diseases, there's also no 100% guarantee that you won't. To put it simply, being a smoker is a huge risk not worth taking.