These include cancer of the nose, sinuses, voice box, and throat. Smoking also increases the risk of many other cancers of GI gastrointestinal , urinary, and female reproductive systems. The symptoms of smoking-related lung diseases may look like other lung conditions or health problems. If you have any symptoms of lung disease, see your healthcare provider as soon as possible. Secondhand smoke is smoke that is exhaled by smokers and smoke emitted from the burning end of a lit cigarette, cigar, or pipe.
It can also lead to lung conditions and heart disease. Symptoms linked to secondhand smoke exposure may include:. Children and infants exposed to tobacco smoke are more likely to experience ear infections, and asthma. They are also at a higher risk for sudden infant death syndrome SIDS than children and infants not exposed to secondhand smoke. People who quit smoking can actually reverse some of the lung damage. Other benefits of quitting smoking may include the following:.
Cigars actually pose the same, if not greater, risk as cigarettes for oral cancer. Although many cigar smokers do not inhale, their risk for oral, throat, and esophageal cancers is the same as for cigarette smokers. Consider these facts from the CDC:. Compared with nonsmokers, cigar smokers who inhale are more likely to develop oral cancer, esophageal cancer, and laryngeal cancer.
Cigar smokers who inhale and smoke 5cigars a day may have a lung cancer risk similar to one-pack-a-day cigarette smokers. Secondhand smoke from cigars contains toxins and cancer-causing agents carcinogens similar to secondhand cigarette smoke, but in higher concentrations.
Try to get enough sleep each night and eat healthy. Along with exercise, healthy sleeping and eating habits will help you cope with quitting. Join a smoking cessation program or support group. These programs are available in most communities. There are also programs available by phone and online:.
There are both prescription and over-the-counter medicines that can help you stop smoking. Talk with your healthcare provider about these medicines and whether or not any of them are right for you. Varenicline tartrate. It helps to lessen the discomfort of quitting. Lungs begin to return to normal pink, elastic after you quit smoking. It takes anywhere from 1 to 9 months for cilia to repair themselves, longer for long term smokers.
Things like diet and exercise can help repair your lungs over time. Lung repair may happen faster than you think. While some smokers may have caused irreversible damage to their lungs, quitting smoking will always lead to improved lung function, even if they never return to how they were before smoking. Read: Quit Smoking Medications. After 30 years of smoking, the lungs will likely have irreversible damage and the risk of all types of disease is drastically increased, including lung cancer, COPD, and heart disease.
While the lungs may never return to normal, it is still worth quitting smoking even after 30 or more years. This damage leads to build of tar and other pollutants in your lungs which can cause discoloration and the blackening of lung tissue. Cigarettes contain many chemicals including nicotine, hydrogen cyanide, formaldehyde, lead, arsenic, ammonia, radioactive elements, benzene, carbon monoxide, tobacco-specific nitrosamines TSNAs and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons PAHs.
When you inhale the cigarette smoke there is tar present while the product is being burned. The last puffs on a cigarette can contain twice as much tar as with the first puffs. This tar sticks to the cells in your lungs called the cilia and paralyzes them. If cilia is paralyzed, you are more at risk to develop lung diseases such as emphysema, chronic bronchitis, and lung cancer. After you quit smoking, your cilia begin to heal which takes 1 to 9 months.
However, the tar that caused the damage in the first place can take even longer to leave your lungs. Healing your lungs completely will take time and sometimes you are never completely healed from the damage. The bottom line is that smoking, especially long term, has serious and often irreversible damage. The sooner you quit smoking, the better chances you have to repair your lungs. There is no magic pill to heal your lungs after quitting. While they will likely never return to normal, your lungs will begin to heal the moment you quit.
One large study found that after 20 years smoke-free, the risk of COPD drops to the same as if you have never smoked and after 30 years, the risk of lung cancer also drops to the same risk as non-smokers. There is no magic pill or solution to clean your lungs after quitting smoking. This is mostly because of the extensive and internal damage smoking does to the body. That said, there are some things that can be done to help improve lung health. Smoking is a chemical addiction and oftentimes people need help to quit.
According to the American Heart Association, the science behind nicotine addiction is clear, yet many people still do not realize cigarettes are as hard to quit as cocaine or heroin. What does cigarette smoke really do to the lungs? To really comprehend the effect of tobacco smoke on the lungs we need to take a look at both the anatomy—how the appearance of the lungs changes, and the physiology—how the function of a smoker's lungs differ from those of healthy lungs.
Yet we want to dig even deeper than that. What do a smoker's lungs look like beginning with the changes you can see with your naked eye, down to the genetic changes too small to even be seen under a microscope, but often more ominous? The posters we spoke of earlier didn't lie. Let's start with what you may see if you could look at whole lungs exposed to tobacco.
The photo above is honestly what the lungs of a life-long smoker look like on a visual inspection with the naked eye. It's important to state that not all black lungs are related to tobacco smoke. Other irritants that can be inhaled may cause this appearance as well, such as the black lung disease sometimes seen in coal miners. Yet, it's very easy to tell when looking at a set of lungs whether or not a person smoked during his life. Many people wonder what the black or brown color comes from.
When you inhale cigarette smoke, there are thousands of tiny carbon-based particles that are inhaled. Our bodies have a special way of dealing with these particles to get them out of the way if you will. As soon as you inhale a puff of cigarette smoke, your body is alerted to the fact that toxic particles have invaded. Inflammatory cells rush to the scene.
One type of white blood cell called macrophages may be thought of as the "garbage trucks" of our immune systems. Macrophages essentially "eat" the nasty brown-black particles in cigarette smoke in a process called phagocytosis. Since these particles could be damaging even to garbage truck cells, they are walled off in tiny vesicles and stored as toxic waste. And there they sit. As more and more macrophages containing debris build up in the lungs and lymph nodes within the chest, the darker the lungs appear.
You may be wondering if the brown and black color ever goes away. After all, macrophages don't live forever. When a macrophage dies, and the vesicles of cigarette waste are released, younger macrophages rush to the scene and ingest the particles. This process can occur over and over during a person's life.
This is not to say that healing doesn't take place when someone quits smoking. It does. But the discoloration in the lungs may remain indefinitely. Taking a step down in size and looking at the lungs more closely, an increasing number of tobacco-related injuries are found.
Under a microscope, the cells and surrounding tissues become visible as a well-appointed city, but a city ravaged by the toxic cloud of smoke that has descended upon it.
Different structures in the respiratory tract are affected in different ways. The cilia are tiny hair-like appendages that line the bronchi, and the smaller bronchioles.
The job of the cilia is to catch foreign material that finds its way into the airways and propel it up and out of the lungs to the throat in a wave-like manner. From the throat, this material can then be swallowed and destroyed by stomach acids.
Unfortunately, toxins in cigarette smoke such as acrolein and formaldehyde paralyze these tiny cilia so they cannot perform their function. This result is that other toxins over 70 of them carcinogens and infectious organisms end up being left within the lungs where they can do damage both at the cellular level and at the molecular level, changes that can, in turn, lead to cancer and other diseases.
Inflammatory cells that are drawn to the scene in the airways secrete mucus in response to the harmful chemicals in cigarette smoke. This mucus can limit the amount of oxygen-rich air that reaches the smallest airways where gas exchange takes place. Mucus can also provide a nourishing breeding ground for the growth of harmful bacteria. Under the microscope, the airways can appear stretched out—like the elastic in an old pair of shorts.
This decrease in elasticity caused by components of tobacco smoke has important functional repercussions as well discussed later on. The alveoli are the smallest of airways and the final lung-based destination of oxygen that we breathe in.
These alveoli contain elastin and collagen which allows them to expand with inspiration and deflate with expiration. Altogether, the surface area of your alveoli is around 70 square meters, and if you laid them flat and placed them end to end they would cover a tennis court. Toxins in cigarette smoke damage these tiny structures in a few ways.
It is easy for toxins to damage the thin walls causing them to rupture. Cigarette smoke also damages the alveoli that remain intact, decreasing their ability to expand and contract. Damage to the alveoli is a self-perpetuating problem. As more alveoli become damaged, there is more air trapping in the alveoli air cannot be breathed out which results in the dilation and rupture of more alveoli.
In general, a large percent of the alveoli must be damaged before symptoms—hypoxia due to less oxygen being present for exchange to take place—occurs. Problems with oxygen exchange between the alveoli and capillaries are discussed further under function.
At the cellular level, it's not just lung tissue that is damaged. The tiniest of blood vessels, the capillaries, that are closely associated with the smallest airways are also damaged by tobacco smoke.
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