You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Stopping smoking’ tag.
Secondhand tobacco smoke is extremely toxic; when you breathe it you are exposed to more than 50 cancer-causing agents. These toxins also poison your airways, making you cough and making it harder for you to breathe. Long-term exposure to tobacco smoke causes asthma, pneumonia, ear and sinus infections, reduced stamina for sports, and eventually heart disease and cancer.
We do not think people are deliberately trying to injure you, but they may be unaware of the potential that their smoking has to harm your health. Perhaps you can share this with them when they are smoking around you. Because smoke is a gas, trying to restrict it to a particular room doesn’t really work.
It is not rude to want to safeguard your health. If people take their cigarettes outside like a lot of them are being forced to do now, thank them for being considerate of your needs. If they don’t, it would be sensible for you to leave the room whenever they light up.
From the department of the obvious comes this advice.
If you smoke and you’re pregnant or planning to become pregnant, it’s especially important to kick the habit now. The toxic chemicals inhaled when you smoke are easily passed to the unborn baby.
The American Pregnancy Association offers these suggestions to help you stop smoking during pregnancy:
- Make a list of all of the health benefits of quitting for yourself and your baby.
- Replace smoking with healthier habits, such as having a snack or a cup of tea with your newspaper, instead of a cigarette.
- Surround yourself with nonsmokers.
- Have a friend or family member ready to call when you need support.
- Ask your doctor for ways to help you quit, including tips on which smoking cessation aids are safe for you and baby.
- Set a goal date for quitting.
Women who smoke have heart attacks nearly 14 years earlier than women who don’t smoke, Norwegian doctors reported in a study presented to the European Society of Cardiology. For men, the gap is not so dramatic; male smokers have heart attacks about six years earlier than men who don’t smoke.
“This is not a minor difference,” said Dr. Silvia Priori, a cardiologist at the Scientific Institute in Pavia, Italy. “Women need to realize they are losing much more than men when they smoke,” she said. Priori was not connected to the research.
Dr. Morten Grundtvig and colleagues from the Innlandet Hospital Trust in Lillehammer, Norway, based their study on data from 1,784 patients admitted for a first heart attack at a hospital in Lillehammer.
Their study found that the men on average had their first heart attack at age 72 if they didn’t smoke, and at 64 if they did.
Women in the study had their first heart attack at age 81 if they didn’t smoke, and at age 66 if they did.
After adjusting for other heart risk factors like blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes, researchers found that the difference for women was about 14 years and for men, about six years.
Previous studies looking at a possible gender difference have been inconclusive.
Doctors have long suspected that female hormones protect women against heart disease. Estrogen is thought to raise the levels of good cholesterol as well as enabling blood vessel walls to relax more easily, thus lowering the chances of a blockage.
Grundtvig said that smoking might make women go through menopause earlier, leaving them less protected against a heart attack. With rising rates of smoking in women – compared with falling rates in men – Grundtvig said that doctors expect to see increased heart disease in women.
“Smoking might erase the natural advantage that women have,” said Dr. Robert Harrington, a professor of medicine at Duke University and spokesman for the American College of Cardiology.
Doctors aren’t yet sure if other cardiac risk factors like cholesterol and obesity also affect women differently.
“The difference in how smoking affects women and men is profound,” Harrington said. “Unless women don’t smoke or quit, they risk ending up with the same terrible diseases as men, only at a much earlier age.”
From the department of the obvious we have the following: Young women who smoke are twice as likely to have a stroke as their nonsmoking peers, according to a new study. And the more cigarettes a woman smokes per day, the bigger her risk.
The study was published in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association. The researchers, who studied women ages 15 to 49, found that women who smoke one to 10 cigarettes per day increase their stroke risk 2.2 times. Women who smoke 11 to 20 cigarettes per day increase stroke risk 2.5 times, while those who smoke 21 to 39 per day increase stroke risk more than fourfold. The heaviest smokers — those who smoke 40 or more cigarettes per day — increase their risk 9.1 times.
The study followed 466 women who had suffered their first strokes. A comparison group consisted of 604 women of similar age, race, and ethnicity who had not had a stroke. A detailed smoking history was obtained during face-to-face interviews. Women were classified according to their smoking status as never-smokers, former smokers, or current smokers.
“Our study adds strong evidence that cutting down helps reduce stroke risk, but quitting is unquestionably the best option,” researcher John Cole, MD, assistant professor of neurology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, says in a news release.
In 2005, an estimated 21% of American women aged 18-44 were cigarette smokers, according to researchers. The good news is that when women stop smoking, their risk of having a stroke decreases. Stroke risk decreases significantly three years after smoking stops. After five years of being smoke-free, former smokers have the same risk of stroke as never-smokers. And the earlier that smokers quit, the better. People who quit smoking prior to age 35 can have the same life expectancy as those who have never smoked.
The researchers point out that media campaigns and high prices for tobacco products help curb smoking rates among young people. “Our study supports the need to target smoking as a preventable and modifiable risk factor for cerebrovascular disease in young women,” they write.
The 2007 Smoker Misperceptions survey reveals there are significant differences between what smokers believe are the risks associated with smoking and the realities of tobacco-related disease and death. Check out these igorant smokers assumptions
- Sixty-six percent didn’t know that their chance of developing lung cancer was greater than that of a non-smoker.
- Forty percent incorrectly believed that developing lung cancer depends primarily on genes, not on behaviors like smoking.
- Eight percent didn’t know that smoking has been proven to cause blindness.
- Ten percent didn’t know that smoking has been proven to cause hair loss.
- Twenty-six percent didn’t know that smoking has been proven to cause impotence.
- Thirty-three percent mistakenly thought that they could reverse the harmful effects of smoking by exercising and taking vitamins.
A LONG, long time ago, two Martians were sent to planet Earth on a mission. When they returned home, they submitted this report to the committee: “The Earth people have an odd practice. They light a fire at the end of a poisonous substance and then suck the smoke into their body. This results in much sickness and even death. The habit is also very expensive. Strange, those Earth people!” Strange, indeed. Listen to the words of Graham Lee Hemminger: “Tobacco is a dirty weed, but I like it. It satisfies no normal need, still I like it. It makes you thin, it makes you lean. It takes the hair right off your bean. It’s the worst darn stuff I’ve ever seen. I like it
Here’s another one from Russell Hoban. “What a weird thing smoking is and I can’t stop it,” he wrote. “I feel cozy, have a sense of well-being when I’m smoking, poisoning myself, killing myself slowly. Not so slowly maybe. I have all kinds of pains I don’t want to know about and I know that’s what they’re from. But when I don’t smoke I scarcely feel as if I’m living. I don’t feel as if I’m living unless I’m killing myself.”The Geneva-based World Health Organization (WHO) reports that smoking related-diseases kill one in 10 adults globally, or cause four million deaths. “Every eight seconds, someone dies from tobacco use,” it points out. By 2030, if current trends continue, smoking will kill one in six people
Every year, there are about 20,000 smoking-related deaths in the Philippines, where about 60 percent of men smoke. Studies have shown that tobacco use will drain nearly 20 percent of the household income of smokers’ families.
In a country where laws abound, there are no national laws prohibiting minors from buying cigarettes. In fact, many vendors of cigarettes are children. Small wonder, as many as 40 percent of adolescents boys smoke. Most of them started smoking in their early teens. The majority of these young smokers said peer pressure was one reason why they took up smoking. Most now wish they did not smoke.
Now, here’s something that may have been taken from a movie script: A teenager was sitting beside an old woman in a non-airconditioned bus. Thirty minutes after the bus left the terminal, the young man took a stick of cigarette from his pocket and asked the old woman, “Would you mind if I smoke?”
Hearing those words, the old woman stopped praying her rosary and looked at the young man squarely. “Yes, I mind,” she said. “I don’t want to have cancer.”
Physicians from all over the world agree: cigarette smoking is one of the top causes of cases. In the United States, smoking alone is directly responsible for approximately 30 percent of all cancer deaths annually.
According to the US National Cancer Institute (NCI), smoking also causes chronic lung disease (emphysema and chronic bronchitis), cardiovascular disease, stroke, and cataracts. Smoking during pregnancy can cause stillbirth, low birth weight, sudden infant death syndrome, and other serious pregnancy complications. One British survey found that nearly 99 percent of women did not know of the link between smoking and cervical cancer.
The health risks caused by smoking are not limited to smokers. Exposure to secondhand smoke significantly increases the risk of lung cancer and heart disease in nonsmokers, as well as several respiratory illnesses in young children. (Secondhand smoke is a combination of the smoke that is released from the end of a burning cigarette and the smoke exhaled from the lungs of smokers).
What makes cigarette smoking so deadly? Well, it contains about 4,000 chemical agents, including over 60 cancer-causing chemicals. In addition, many of these substances, such as carbon monoxide, tar, arsenic, and lead, are poisonous and toxic to the human body.
Nicotine is a drug that is naturally present in the tobacco plant and is primarily responsible for a person’s addiction to tobacco products, including cigarettes. During smoking, nicotine is absorbed quickly into the bloodstream and travels to the brain in a matter of seconds. Nicotine causes addiction to cigarettes and other tobacco products that are similar to the addiction produced by using heroin and cocaine.
Ready to quit smoking? Here are the benefits, if you do, according to the NCI: “Quitting smoking decreases the risk of lung and other cancers, heart attack, stroke, and chronic lung disease. The earlier a person quits, the greater the health benefit.”
For example, research has shown that people who quit before age 50 reduce their risk of dying in the next 15 years by half compared with those who continue to smoke. Smoking low-yield cigarettes, as compared to cigarettes with higher tar and nicotine, provides no clear benefit to health
Women who smoke and have a specific genetic makeup are at significant risk for the development of breast cancer, according to a recent study published by the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.
A research group led by Christine Ambrosone, PhD, Cancer Prevention and Population Sciences Program, Roswell Park Cancer Institute (RPCI) and Jenny Chang-Claude, PhD, Professor in Epidemiology at University of Heidelberg analyzed data from 10 of the 13 studies published in the last 10 years in which they evaluated genetic information, smoking habits and breast cancer risk in 4,889 premenopausal and 7,033 postmenopausal women.
Analysis demonstrated a significant interaction between breast cancer risk, smoking, and a specific gene called the NAT2 that produces the enzyme, N-acetyltransferase 2 (NAT2).
Tobacco companies have marketed their products with well thought out campaigns utilizing all of the media, including print media, the movies, television and musicians. The images of Hollywood stars and musicians smoking have had an influence on people’s decisions to start smoking. People, and especially young people, see these images, and imagine how cool they would look if they smoked. They think it is sexy to smoke. They it is cool? There is absolutely zero “cool” factor to smoking. Here’s a quick question to any teens or college aged readers out there: How does it taste to “make-out” with someone who smokes? Do you enjoy it in the least bit?
There are other reasons people start smoking, but more often than not, it is because of the image that is created in their minds through the use of movies and media that prtray smoking as a “prop” that makes the scene and the actor more Believable!!! Could they be any further from the facts or truth?
In some parts of the world smoking is viewed as a “rite of passage”. Seeing third world youngsters smoking, some of them 10 years and younger, is not unusual. But my question to you and them, what education is going on to teach and explain to them the hazards and dangers of smoking? None. So they smoke.
Most people get started smoking with their first cigarettes given to them by older friends or family members. Or they sneak it from someone else or they get someone to buy them their first pack of squares. It’s obvious who the new smokers are, because they are trying like hell to look cool. Little do they know what is in store for them if they do not stop. How depressing is it to see Santa smoking? Such was the mentality many years ago!
Part of the reason they smoke is to be a part of the crowd that they admire or people they aspire to emulate. Many times their peers encourage them to start, and even show them how it is done, even how to do things such as blowing smoke rings, etc. Because they are not part of a particular clique, they use smoking as a crutch to support them and give them an identity.
It is about image more than anything else as most people would agree that the first cigarette is certainly not pleasant. If food tasted that bad most of us would never eat again. It becomes a challenge to overcome the coughing, burning throat, the choking, the burning of the eyes. If something is seen to be cool or fashionable then there will be many people who will do it simply to be accepted by their peers.
The majority of people find that smoking tastes bad and makes them feel bad until they become accustomed to the taste then those feelings disappear. By that time they have started to become addicted to the tobacco and nicotine and a new problem presents itself.
Statistics show that the majority of people who smoke wish they had never started, if only they could wind back the clock they would certainly never have started. They fool themselves into thinking that they can quit any time they want. After a few tries at quitting they buy into the notions that quitting is too hard, they do not have the will power, smoking is really not as bad as people say. They begin to justify their habit with comments like;
- I really enjoy smoking,
- It relaxes me,
- It keeps me thin.
- I can quit any time I want.
After a very short time the addictive nature of tobacco and nicotine start to control the smoking habit, which makes so many people continue to smoke long after they realize the many ways it is affecting their health. Knowing that they are shortening their life is generally not enough incentive to quit.
Basically we want you to quit, no mattter which way you go. Just make sure that you make 2007 the last time you even think about smoking.
Study: Developing countries embracing lifestyle habits linked to disease
About 7.6 million people will die this year worldwide from various types of cancer, with lung cancer — heavily driven by smoking — killing 975,000 men and 376,000 women, the American Cancer Society said Monday.
Cancer also is increasing in developing countries as people embrace habits linked to cancer such as smoking and fattier diets, American Cancer Society epidemiologist Ahmedin Jemal said in a telephone interview.
In all, about 12.3 million people will develop cancer this year, the organization projected, using data from the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a branch of the World Health Organization.
About 20,000 people die of cancer every day worldwide, the report showed. Smoking was heavily responsible for the lung cancer scourge.
Cancer’s burden is on the rise in developing countries as deaths from infectious diseases and child mortality fall and more people live longer, Jemal said. Cancer is more common as people get older, Jemal noted.
Lower survival rates
The report estimated 5.4 million people will get cancer and 2.9 million will die of cancer in developed nations, with 6.7 million cases and 4.7 million deaths in developing nations.
Overall, 75 percent of children with cancer live for five years in Europe and North America, compared to three-year survival rates of only 48 to 62 percent in Central American countries.
Cancers related to infections, such as stomach, liver and cervical cancer, were more common in developing countries, the group said. Fewer people survive cancer in developing countries due to lack of availability of early detection and treatment services, according to the report.
Globally, 15 percent of all cancers are caused by infections. The Helicobacter pylori bacteria causes stomach cancer, human papillomavirus causes cervical cancer and hepatitis can cause liver cancer.
Breast cancer scourge
Among men, the three most commonly diagnosed cancers are prostate, lung and colorectal cancer in developed countries and lung, stomach and liver cancer in developing countries.
Among women, the three most common cancers are lung, breast and colorectal in developed countries and breast, cervical and stomach cancer in developing countries.
About 465,000 women will die of breast cancer this year, making it the leading cause of cancer death among women worldwide, the group said.
<