Smoking and Heart Disease – What’s the Link?

Have You Heard Smoking Is Bad For Your Heart?

In addition to causing lung cancer, smoking and heart disease tend to go hand in hand. The thing is that many people don’t realize how smoking can possibly cause heart attack and strokes, which is why it’s important to consider these risks when you smoke and make sure that you’re well informed. For instance, you probably didn’t know that tobacco has about 4,000 chemicals which are added to it. Many of these are poisonous, so you’re giving that to yourself day after day.

With time, chemicals such as arsenic which commonly are found in tobacco smoke can have a very negative effect on the overall health of a smoker that may cause problems such as lung cancer, emphysema, COPD and heart disease. However, the chemicals alone aren’t the only problem that you face as a smoker, because smoke contains tar and carbon monoxide and that can cause serious damage to the heart.

The Effect of Nicotine

One of the things with smoking and heart disease is that nicotine causes your blood pressure to go up. Carbon monoxide is smoke and that will cause the heart to beat harder. Also, since it replaces oxygen in your blood if you do smoke, this is in your system for days. When you’re young, or haven’t smoked before, nicotine’s effects on your blood pressure may seem minuscule and it probably is, but over time, this can cause your heart to suffer from damage that will lead to heart disease.

You should also know that the heart and lungs are linked. The lungs offer oxygen to the blood so that the body can get the healing oxygen rich blood throughout the body. When you smoke, you are suffocating your body and your blood. Smoking and heart disease go hand in hand because your heart will work harder to get the blood through the body in an attempt to get oxygen to the extremities. So, this is yet another factor with smoking and heart disease that you should consider.

Now, if you currently smoke or if you smoked in the past, you should know that there is new evidence which shows that the heart can often heal much like the lungs do and that’s good news for you if you’re thinking of quitting or have already quit. The longer you go without smoking, the less likely you are to suffer from heart disease or lung cancer as a result of smoking, so even if you’ve been smoking for years, it’s never too late to adopt a new, healthy lifestyle and work to break the habit before your heart suffers more than it needs to.

Quitting smoking is hard, but having heart disease because you smoke is harder. Isn’t it time to try to kick the habit once and for all and work to reduce your chances of heart disease because of smoking?