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How to die early with smoke?

There has been a lot of research done on smokers and the effect of this habit on them. For instance, it has been found that on an average, smoking cigarettes reduces a person’s life by 10 years, while quitting at any age greatly reduces the risks of dying due to smoking.

Studies also show that habitual smokers are likely to die before the age of 70. Today, we know that half of all habitual cigarette smokers die due to smoking, while a quarter of them die between 35 and 69 years. The major killer due to smoking is lung cancer. It has been found that 94% of all people with lung cancer are smokers. So if you start smoking at age 16 years, you are five times likelier to die of lung cancer than if you began smoking at a later age.

And if you started smoking at 16, your chances of dying early due to smoking are 15 times more than a non-smoker. Your risk of dying of lung cancer rather than non-smokers is intensified by 10 times. And if you are a heavy smoker, you have a 15-25 percent greater risk of dying early than non-smokers.

Further, if you smoke two cigarette packs a day, you are the perfect candidate to die of smoking eight years before your time. Statistics also point to the fact that if you smoke up to nine cigarettes a day, your life is shortened by four years, while your children can be prone to all kinds of lung infections.

Why do smokers die early due to smoking? When smoking, the body immediately responds to the toxins present in it. Of them, nicotine and carbon monoxide are two chemicals that affect the heart and vascular system the most. Nicotine damages our health by increasing the blood pressure and heart rate and decreasing the blood flow to the heart all over the body by narrowing the blood vessels. Due to these changes, the heart works harder to send oxygen in the blood to different parts of the body.

Carbon monoxide (CO) damages our health by reducing the amount of oxygen the blood can carry. If there is any trace of carbon monoxide in the blood, that means less oxygen is being pumped to the heart and less oxygen in the blood stream than the body’s requirements. When you smoke, you also increase the amount of cholesterol, sugar and other chemicals in the body too, making you the perfect candidate for diabetes and associated problems.

Smoking also increases the risk of atherosclerosis or building up fatty deposits on the artery walls. It is here that carbon monoxide and nicotine damage the inner walls of the blood vessels that play a significant role in building up cholesterol and plaque in the blood vessels, causing the blood vessels to constrict and harden. This forces the heart to pump harder through constricted or narrowed blood vessels and often causes blood clots. When the blood flow to the heart muscles stops, the person suffers a heart attack.

Your habit of smoking can also cost you your job-in fact, you have a 22% greater chance of losing your job because of smoking-related illness than non-smokers. Do you really want to risk so much just for a puff?