Lung disease & smoking

Smoking has a wide variety of health effects and can affect just about every organ in the body. But one of the organs that is most directly affected is the lungs. This is maybe not surprising as this is the organ in direct contact with cigarette smoke. Smoking is injurious to health"; this is the caution advice that we read on all cigarettes packets. Still we go ahead to take that puff of ecstasy. Why? Are we trying to be ignorant or is it something else.

Ill effects of smoking It is smoking that triples the risk of dying from various heart diseases, bronchitis and emphysema. It is smoking that leads to asthma and lung cancer in many people. It is smoking that makes a person baffle for air 3 times more that a non-smoker. Smoking makes you weak and unfit for athletics and various other sports. Smoking makes people avoid you because it makes your hair and clothes stink. It stains your teeth and you have bad breath. Your lips are often cracked and you look pale. Is that what you call looking mature. No. So quit smoking because it will do no good to you. Smoking is a contagious disease because it not only weakens it victim but also those who are around him. This is better known as passive smoking where the smoke puffed out by a smoker does harm to the lungs and chest of the person who inhales that air. It is thus the need of the hour that we should take up the matter seriously and do something constructive to free our society from the grips of this deadly disease.

In so many ways smoking is harmful to the body, but it is the most dangerous to the lungs. How does smoking affect your lungs, then?

Know that it is not only your lungs that are affected, but also the airways and your other respiratory organs. When you start smoking cigarettes, chemicals enter the body through the mouth and nose and into the lungs. Burning tobacco produces more than 4,000 chemicals, which include carbon monoxide, nicotine and tar.

The tar from the cigarettes sticks to the cilia, the tiny hair-like structures that line the airways in the lungs. The cilia typically acts as little brooms that sweep out harmful dirt – but when cigarette is smoked, the cilia can’t work properly because the tar sticks to the cilia and is therefore covered. Even a stick is enough to slow down the cilia, and with the cilia not performing its task properly, dirt can stay in lungs and so cause problems. Mucus also gets piled up, and germs don’t get swept out. Overtime, as smoking get heavier and more frequent, the cilia dies and the lungs is exposed to even more dangerous substances.