|
How smoking causes heart disease?
|
Stop smoking!
Remember you were born a non smoker..
Smoking causes heart disease. Smoking tobacco, cigarettes or cigars, is the largest preventable cause of heart attack related deaths worldwide. If you are a women and smoking, your risk of developing a heart disease is even higher.
Smokers suffer more heart attacks. Angina is 20 times more common in smokers than in non-smokers. In fact, smoking is directly responsible for 20% of all heart attack related deaths. Smokers have 4 times more risk of dying from a heart attack than non-smokers.
Worse, it aggravates other heart attack risk factors like high cholesterol, high blood pressure (hypertension), diabetes and atherosclerosis ..the basic cause of most heart attacks, strokes and many more peripheral vascular diseases. Atherosclerosis is the phenomenon that causes narrowing and blocking of all arteries including coronary arteries (blood supply tubes of the heart). Smoking cigarettes aggravates the process of atherosclerosis.
How does smoking causes heart disease?
It is not only nicotine. Cigarette smoking sends more than 4000 types of chemicals – read poisons – in your body. Many of these are responsible for lung and many other kinds of cancers for which there is more awareness. But, not many people know about how these lethal poisons from cigarette smoking damage heart and kills at much younger age by heart disease and heart attacks.
• Carbon mono oxide and other harmful chemicals directly injure the inner lining of coronary arteries. These damaged areas become the focus of fat deposition – the cholesterol plaque. These plaques clog the arteries. Clogged coronary arteries become narrow and stop from the blood to flow freely. Thus decreasing oxygen delivery for heart muscles.
• Smoking tobacco in any form, cigarette smoking or cigars, arouses the sympathetic system to produce more adrenaline, nor-adrenaline, cortisol and many other stress-related biochemicals. The result is:
• Increased heart rate – requiring more oxygen for the heart
• Irregular heart beating – known as arrhythmias.
• Narrowing or constricting of arteries everywhere in the body. Result is increase in blood pressure. Heart has to pump harder against this elevated blood pressure. It means even more oxygen is needed.
• Blood becomes thicker and its cells (platelets) tend to adhere to each other. Result is more blood clogging and slower blood flow.
• More ‘bad cholesterol’ – LDL - is pumped in the blood.
• Good cholesterol or HDL goes down.
• More insulin is thrown in the blood.
• More insulin, high LDL, low HDL, increased platelet adhesion (this is caused by fibrinogen – which is produced more in response to a stress arousal) – all together make the worst possible recipe. The perfect ground for atherosclerosis – mother of coronary artery disease.
•Chronic smoking decreases the lungs efficiency. Lungs become hard and stiffer. They can deliver lesser amounts of oxygen to the blood.
Here you saw multiple ways how smoking causes heart disease and increase the chances of heart attack. Blocked, clogged arteries, higher resistance (high blood pressure) and decreased oxygen and blood supply – all designer-made elements to create a heart attack.
If you have a heart disease or you are serious about reversing a heart disease - Stop smoking. You were born a non smoker. Become a non smoker again. Resolve to stop smoking today. Take help if you must.
Refuse to smoke. Refuse a heart attack.
After learning how smoking causes heart disease you may like to be informed about
other risk factors of heart attack.
