Health Effects Of Smoking: What You Should Know

In the forty years or so since the Surgeon General’s groundbreaking report on the health effects of smoking, smoking is surprisingly still the main preventable cause of death in the United States. Numerous lives and taxpayers’ dollars are still lost as a result of this damaging and life-threatening habit.

A newer report was released by the Surgeon General recently, in which the “harmful” health effects of smoking was illustrated in greater detail, with particular focus given on the effect of smoking on the various organs in the body. This report served to further emphasize the need to continue global smoking prevention campaigns.

While there has undoubtedly been a lot of progress made with regard to educating people on the harmful links between smoking and health, there still remains a lot of work to be done.

In the newest report released by the Surgeon General on health effects of smoking, a number of new discoveries were announced, among them:

• Smoking can cause people to develop cancer in parts of the body that have not previously been tied in with smoking. These include the kidney, the cervix, and the bone marrow.

• Smoking has a detrimental effect on general health. The adverse health effects of smoking can be passed down from mother to child, they can manifest themselves before birth and last throughout the life of the child.

• Smoking can cause people to develop cataracts, and it may contribute to osteoporosis, which can subsequently increase an older person’s risk of getting a fracture.

• In the years between 1995 and 1999, smoking was the cause of more than 440,000 deaths in the United States every year. This figure represents a 13.2 year reduction of life in male smokers, and a 14.5 year reduction in female smokers.

• The recent efforts of cigarette companies to reduce the amount of tar and nicotine in their products have not resulted in any appreciable benefits in terms of smoking and health.

Based on the results of this 2004 report, a number of conclusions were made, among them:

• Smoking is potentially damaging to almost every bodily organ, it can cause the development of many diseases, and the general health of smokers is impaired.

• Quitting Cigarettes now will bring a number of immediate and long-term benefits to health, greatly reduce the potential risks for incurring smoking-related diseases, and causing a general improvement in health.

• Switching to cigarettes that have lower levels of tar and nicotine will not provide any noticeable advantages with regard to smoking and health.

• Among the other disease that were not previously attributable to smoking but now are, are abdominal aortic aneurysm, cataract, cervical cancer, acute myeloid leukemia, kidney cancer, pneumonia, periodontitis, stomach cancer, and pancreatic cancer. This new list only adds to the list of diseases already known to be the result of smoking such as cancers of the bladder, esophagus, larynx, lungs, oral cavity, and throat, chronic lung disease, coronary heart disease, cardiovascular disease, and the reproductive damage, and sudden infant death syndrome.