Health Effects of Smoking Cigarettes – Nicotine Control Awareness

Archive for June, 2010

by Sudipto_Sarkar

Emphysema and Cigarette Smoke

Not everyone who has emphysema got it from smoking cigarettes. And not every cigarette smoker will develop emphysema. But if you do smoke, you make yourself very vulnerable to this condition.

My dad hated the fact that I smoked cigarettes. At the time I was young and foolish, and I didn’t know anything about emphysema. His story about it is what eventually led me to quit smoking. My dad worked in an auto plant, along with this other guy who was a smoker. He told me how this guy was always “out of breath.” Even though he wasn’t doing anything physically strenuous, he breathed heavy like he had just run up a flight of stairs. Now, I hate that feeling of being out of breath, and I can’t imagine the pain of feeling constantly winded.

When I was in college, I had a professor who was also a medical doctor. He wouldn’t allow anyone to smoke in his auditorium (this was back in the day when you could smoke in class.) His reason: he hated what cigarette smoke does to your lungs. “Oxygen,” he said, “doesn’t go directly into your blood. Rather, it must first be dissolved in a mucus medium that lines your lung’s breathing surface, and from there the hemoglobin in your blood binds with the oxygen that you breathe in.”

That is what makes that layer of crud, caused by chronic smoking, so dangerous. That crud forms a barrier between the air you breath and the mucus lining on your lungs. You then have to breathe faster in order to get more air for your oxygen-starved body.

Emphysema, in short, is a reduction in the ability of the air sacs in your lungs to allow oxygen to get to your blood stream. If you smoke, you are six times more likely to develop this condition than people who don’t smoke. You can also be at risk by chronically breathing in second hand smoke.

A few nice smoking addiction images I found:

Check out these smoking addiction images: