Smoking and Your Health: Every Organ, Secondhand Smoke, and Why Quitting Pays

There's no way around it: smoking harms nearly every organ in the body, some you wouldn't expect, and causes nearly one in five deaths in the United States.

What smoking does

Secondhand smoke

Your smoke harms others. People who breathe it can get many of the same problems as smokers, including heart disease and lung cancer.

• Children exposed to it get more ear infections, colds, pneumonia, bronchitis and severe asthma.
• Pregnant women who breathe it are more likely to go into preterm labor and have a low-birth-weight baby.

Other tobacco

• Cigars and hookahs (water pipes) also deliver harmful chemicals and nicotine — and some cigars contain as much tobacco as a whole pack of cigarettes.
• E-cigarettes are battery-operated devices; using them is vaping. Much about their health effects is still unknown, but they contain nicotine, which is highly addictive and dangerous for pregnant women and their fetuses, children and teens — and they expose others to secondhand aerosol containing harmful chemicals.
• Smokeless tobacco, such as chewing tobacco and snuff, can cause cancers including oral cancer, and raises the risk of heart disease, gum disease and mouth lesions.

Why quit

There is no safe level of tobacco use: even one cigarette a day over a lifetime can cause smoking-related cancer and early death. Quitting lowers your risk and can add years to your life — and the earlier you quit, the greater the benefit.

Some benefits come right away:

• lower heart rate and blood pressure;
• less carbon monoxide in the blood (it cuts the blood's ability to carry oxygen);
• better circulation;
• less coughing and wheezing.

Quitting can be hard, but it is so important for your health. Ask your health care provider for help.

Sources

Based on the MedlinePlus health topic "Smoking," National Library of Medicine; a work of the United States government in the public domain.