Self Help

Let’s take a look at what happens inside your body each time you light up. Think about how quickly tobacco smoke can produce harmful effects.

Your Eyes, Nose, & Throat: Within a few seconds of your first puff, irritating gases (formaldehyde, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and others) begin to work on sensitive membranes of your eyes, nose, and throat. Your eyes water, your nose runs, and your throat is irritated. If you continue smoking, these irritating gases will contribute to your smoker’s cough. Continued smoking produces abnormal thickening in the membranes lining your throat, accompanied by cellular changes that resemble those that occur in throat cancer.

The Lungs: Continued exposure can completely paralyze the lungs’ natural cleansing process.

1. Your respiratory rate increases, forcing your lungs to work harder.
2. Irritating gases produce chemical injury to the tissues of your lungs. This speeds up the production of mucus and leads to an increased tendency to cough up sputum.
3. Excess mucus serves as a breeding ground for a variety of bacteria and viruses. You become more susceptible to colds, flu, bronchitis, and other respiratory infections. And if you do come down with an infection, your body is less able to fight it, because smoking impairs the ability of the white blood cells to fight invading organisms.
4. The lining of your bronchi begins to thicken, predisposing you to cancer. Most lung cancers arise in the bronchial lining.
5. Smoke weakens the free-roving scavenger cells that remove foreign particles from the air sacs of the lungs. Continued smoke exposure adversely affects elastin (the enzyme that keeps your lungs flexible), predisposing you to emphysema.
6. Many of the compounds you inhale are deposited as a layer of sticky tar on the lining of your throat and bronchi and in the delicate air sacs of your lungs. A pack-a-day smoker pours about a pint - 16 ounces - of tar into his or her lungs each year. This tar is rich in cancer producing chemicals.

Your Heart: From the moment smoke reaches your lungs, your heart is forced to work harder. It beats an extra 10 to 25 times per minute, or as many as 36,000 additional times per day.

Because of the irritating effect of nicotine and other components of tobacco smoke, your heartbeat is more likely to be irregular. A recent Surgeon General’s report estimated that each year about 170,000 heart attacks are caused by smoking. Another unofficial statistic in the literature is that half of smokers’ first heart attacks are fatal. In other words, if you are smoking and you have a heart attack, you have only a fifty-fifty chance of survival. Between 75 and 80 percent of survivors stop smoking after their first heart attack.