How can smoking affect your health?

Smoking damages your lungs

Smoking damages the airways and small air sacs in the lungs. This can cause chronic coughing, wheezing, trouble breathing, and long-term (chronic) lung disease. More than 90% of deaths due to chronic bronchitis and emphysema – together these are known as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) – are caused by smoking. Today, more women than men die from COPD, and evidence suggests that women are more likely to get severe COPD at younger ages than men.

The risk of COPD goes up with the number of cigarettes smoked each day and with the length of time a woman has been smoking. Female smokers aged 35 or older are almost 13 times more likely to die from emphysema or bronchitis than those who have never smoked.

The lungs grow more slowly in teenage girls who smoke. And adult women who smoke start losing lung function in early adulthood.

Smoking causes other health problems

Smoking can cause or worsen poor blood flow to the arms and legs (a condition known as peripheral vascular diseaseor PVD). This can limit everyday activities such as walking, and may lead to open sores that don’t heal. Even worse, surgery to improve the blood flow often fails in people who keep smoking. This is why many doctors who operate on blood vessels (vascular surgeons) won’t do certain surgeries on patients with PVD unless they stop smoking. Stopping smoking lowers a woman’s risk of PVD. And in people who already have PVD, quitting smoking improves the odds that PVD treatments will work.

Women who smoke, especially after going through menopause, have lower bone density (thinner bones). This means they have a higher risk for broken bones, including hip fracture, than women who do not smoke. They may also be at higher risk for getting rheumatoid arthritis and cataracts (clouding of the lenses of the eyes), as well as age-related macular degeneration, which can cause blindness.

Smoking shortens lives

A large 2013 study of women in the United Kingdom found that 2 out of 3 deaths in smokers who were in their 50s, 60s, and 70s were caused by smoking. The researchers observed that continuing smokers lose at least 10 years of their lifespans, but added that smokers who quit before age 40 were able to avoid 90% of the early deaths caused by continued smoking. If the women quit before age 30, they were able to avoid more than 97% of these early deaths.