There’s good news for smokers who want to quit the habit: Your health prospects steadily improve once you quit smoking.
A person that quit smoking as little as five years ago has the same risk of stroke as a person who has never smoked, according to the Surgeon General.
However, it’s hard for many of us to understand the connection between cigarette smoking and the health of the heart and arteries. The problem begins with the content of smoke. There are more than 4,000 chemicals in tobacco smoke, many of them known to be toxic. These chemicals cause a cascade of health effects in the vascular system.
Among the chemicals in cigarette smoke are the addictive drug nicotine, the poisonous gases carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide, plus cyanide, benzene, formaldehyde, acetylene, ammonia and methanol.
Most people are highly aware that smoking causes deadly lung diseases, including lung cancer and emphysema. But the habit has a disastrous effect on the vascular system as well. How? Smoking causes the blood vessels to constrict, which reduces blood circulation. The toxins from cigarette smoke also injure the arteries, contributing to scarring, thickening, and the buildup of fatty deposits on the interior lining. This “hardening of the arteries” is called atherosclerosis.
Some of the fatty deposits, called plaque, can be prone to cracking and causing inflammation on the interior lining of the arteries. The body reacts to this injury by flooding the spot with blood-clotting cells. A blood clot growing on the wall of an artery can break off and block blood flow in a smaller vessel, thus robbing the heart or brain of blood—respectively, a heart attack or a stroke.
USA Government statistics paint a compelling reason to stop smoking:
- Smokers die an average of 13 to 14 years sooner than nonsmokers.
- Worldwide, 5 million deaths per year are attributed to tobacco use, and that figure is expected to double by the year 2020.
- People who smoke cigarettes are 2 to 4 times more likely to get heart disease—the leading cause of death in the United States— than people who don’t smoke.
- People who smoke are 10 times more likely than non-smokers to develop peripheral arterial disease.
- Smokers have twice the risk of a stroke (the third leading cause of death in the United States) over non-smokers.
- Smoking also causes abdominal aortic aneurysm.
- For every person who dies from smoking, there are another 20 people who get at least one serious illness from it.
Sources: American Cancer Society Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Society for Vascular Surgery
