What Diseases Can You Get From Smoking

-->

Most people today know that smoking is harmful and that it can cause different types of diseases including several types of cancer. In this article we will list up the most common diseases a smoker can get from smoking during his smoking career.

Let’s first start with the earliest diseases. The earliest diseases a smoker suffers from are diseases in the respiratory system. The self cleaning system of the lung is being disabled, and the lung is not able to clean itself anymore. The first result is a shortness of breath during physical strain, which is most often being negated or ignored. Later symptoms are coughing, which is usually the first sign for a chronic bronchitis. A chronic bronchitis, also known as the smoker’s cough is the result of the lung’s disability to remove mucus – it has to be coughed out. The chronic bronchitis again can change over to a chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

The symptoms of a COPD are a strong chronic cough with sputum. Unlike a chronic bronchitis, COPD is not tratable, the only possible success is to ease it and to raise the quality of life. Of course every kind of medication for one of the diseases mentioned above assumes a 100% smoking abstinence as a condition for the success of the treatment.

Cancer is another type of disease you can get from smoking. I’m not talking about lung cancer only, though this type of cancer is the most common one for smokers. More than 85% of all lung cancer patients are smokers. Considering the fact, that only 25% – 35% of all people smoke, smoking makes the lung cancer risk for smokers 60 times as high as for non-smokers.

But smokers do not only have a higher risk for lung cancer. They have a higher risk for all types of cancer in the stomach, the kidney, the bleb, the pancreas and the colon.

As cigarette smoke contains a lot of cancer causing substances that are being used to "give a better aroma to cigarettes" it can disable the body’s own ability to find cancer cells in the body and destroy them before a tumor can grow out of them.

The third big group of diseases that are typical for smokers are the cardiovascular diseases. Almost every smoker who has smoked for more than 10 years suffers from at least an increased blood pressure. Every smkoker suffers from an accelerated heart frequency and smoking deposits lots of fat toxic substances in the blood vessels, which eventually cause hypertension. Did you know that over 90% of all heart attack patients under the age of 40 are smokers? Smokers are at high risk for basically every type of cardiovascular disease. The most common diseases are hypertension, apopleptic strokes and heart attacks. Other diseases that strong smokers suffer from are the so-called smoker’s leg or toe. In either case, the affected extremity has to be amputated.

Conscutively a list with the most common diseases smokers can get: