Smoking and the dangers it poses to your health

Each year tobacco claims thousands of lives because of its direct role in stimulating the buildup of plaque along blood vessel walls, interfering with the delivery of oxygen to the heart, raising blood pressure and increasing heart rate — all of which contribute to heart disease and heart attacks. Here's what you need to know.

The evidence is clear: if you're a smoker the most important thing you can do to enhance your heart health is to quit as soon as possible. The "gold standard" of heart disease prevention activity is to help smokers stop smoking.

But quitting isn't easy.

Unless you've been a smoker you won't understand how difficult it can be to break free from the claws of nicotine addiction.

Here are a few facts you need to know about smoking - and that could go far in inspiring you to quit.

• Most smokers began as adolescents and were convinced of two things: they were never going to have health problems, and they could quit whenever they wanted. Wrong on both counts. Individuals exposed to as few as four or five cigarettes a day, for a few days in a row, rapidly become addicted to nicotine.
• The cigarette is one of the most sophisticated and deadly drug-delivery devices in our world. It's carefully designed to ensure the most rapid delivery of nicotine possible, but modern cigarettes also contain a bewildering variety of chemical products — nearly 5,000 — many of which cause cancer while others conspire to affect a variety of other body systems and organs.
• There's no quicker way to get a drug into the body's circulatory system than to inhale it. Heroin, when injected into a vein, takes 14 to 18 seconds to reach the addiction centres of the brain. Nicotine and its 5,000 fellow-travellers in inhaled cigarette smoke are transported through the lungs into the blood stream, and almost instantly to the heart. A cigarettes' chemicals are then immediately pumped into the arterial circulation.
• Remarkably, the nicotine arrives at the addiction centres in the brain in six to eight seconds! (The nicotine uptake is even more rapid if you smoke a "free-basing" cigarette — one in which ammonia is added to the cigarette tobacco to make the smoke more alkaline, which increases the speed with which nicotine is absorbed.)
• Ironically, a cigarette increases the heart's requirements for oxygen while actually reducing the available oxygen. It's like putting your foot to the floor while holding down on the power brakes — and we all know what happens when you do that!
• Nicotine is also an irritant to the heart and can stimulate the development of rapid, irregular heartbeats that may quickly deteriorate into something called ventricular fibrillation — a totally ineffective quivering of the heart muscle that pumps no blood and is the most common cause of sudden death — which explains why smokers are particularly prone to "sudden cardiac death."

Keep these facts in mind to help yourself understand smoking and the dangers it poses to your health.