Whenever
Jamaicans want to warn someone about the dangers inherent in something,
they express it with the utmost in Patois thus:
Nuh guh dah. In English Language, it simply means, “Don’t go there!”
That statement seems strong enough when
one considers the dangers inherent in smoking. This is because smoking
and enjoying sound health don’t go together — you’d have to take one!
But despite this fact, young adolescents — male and female alike — are
taking to the dangerous habit with wild abandon.
“They see it as a rite of passage; while
many see it as a way to be ‘cool.’ Yet, cigarette use is anything but
cool, what with the toll it takes on health, with different consequences
among the sexes,” says General Practitioner, Dr. Friday Odiase.
How does smoking affect the female body,
you may ask? According to the online portal, girlshealth.gov, every part
of a woman’s body pays the price for the unhealthy habit of smoking.
While smoking affects the health of any
smoker, researchers warn that women stand greater risks in certain
respects because of their biological make-up. The risks are numerous,
experts say, and they include:
Stroke
A new research published in the American
Heart Association journal, Stroke, reveals that women smokers may be at
greater risk for a more deadly and uncommon type of stroke.
Researchers compared data from more than
80 international studies that were published between 1966 and 2013, and
found that smoking is linked to more than a 50 per cent greater risk of
ischemic stroke the most common stroke — one that’s caused by a blood
clot — in both men and women. However, for the more deadly type of
stroke — one that is caused by a brain bleed, known as a hemorrhagic
stroke — smoking resulted in a 17 per cent greater risk in women than in
men.
The authors, Drs. Sanne Peters and Mark
Woodward, suggest that the greater risk for bleeding stroke among women
might be due to hormones and how nicotine impacts blood fats. “It seems
that fats, cholesterol and triglycerides increase to a greater extent in
women who smoke, compared with men who smoke, increasing their risk for
coronary heart disease to a greater extent than in male smokers,” they
enthuse.
Brain
The brain of any animal is the seat of
intelligence, and it is one organ of the body that determines whether or
not you stay alive. For instance, once the doctor declares an
individual as brain dead, keeping him on life support becomes
meaningless and all medical support is withdrawn at that point.
Physicians say when you smoke, you toy
with your brain’s health. This is because nicotine — the substance that
makes tobacco addictive — goes to your brain very quickly. Though
nicotine makes the smoker feel good when she is smoking, it can also
make her anxious, nervous, moody, and depressed afterwards.
Worse still, experts say, using tobacco
can cause headaches and dizziness. Having a headache or feeling dizzy
can be unsettling on its own, when combined, experts say, they’re even
more perplexing.
Headache expert and director of the
Headache Centre at the University of California, San Francisco, Dr.
Peter Goadsby, notes that when you are dizzy, you may be feeling
lightheadedness as if you’re going to pass out; or you may feel a sense
of movement, “like you might be spinning or the world might be
spinning.”
The worst part is that these symptoms
might be indicative of other underlying health conditions, which may be
hidden because you are already engaged in unhealthy behaviour.
Mouth
The teeth are sometimes described as
“pearly whites,” indicative of how a healthy set of teeth should look.
But then, tobacco stains your teeth, giving them brownish colour that is
definitely unattractive. To boot, it also gives you bad breath!
Worse still, a nutritionist, Dr. Remi
Omotunde, says smoking ruins the taste buds, such that the smoker won’t
be able to taste her favourite foods. This may lead to bulimia anorexia —
an eating disorder that is entirely unrelated to smoking but which
happens to be a secondary fallout of the habit.
A health gum hovers between healthy pink
and attractive red. However, smoking changes all that, besides causing
bleeding gums and cancers of the mouth and throat, endocrinologists
warn.
Heart
Cardiologists say a normal heart pumps
approximately 4.7-5.7 litres of blood per minute throughout the blood
vessels to various parts of the body by repeated, rhythmic contractions.
Smoking impairs this function and rather increases your heart rate and
blood pressure and causes heart disease and heart attacks. Worse still,
if you try to do activities like exercise or play sports, your heart has
to work harder to keep up. By the way, do you know of any athlete who
is a smoker? Not any in the global arena where a perfectly healthy body
is the least expected of any athlete!
Lungs
Anatomically, physicians say, the lungs
are one of the hardest-working organs in the body. They expand and
contract up to 20 times a minute to supply oxygen to be distributed to
the tissues all over the body and expel carbon dioxide that has been
created throughout the body. That is talking about the normal, healthy
lungs, which a smoker definitely lacks.
Physicians warn that smokers have trouble
breathing because smoking damages the lungs, causing more frequent and
more serious attacks among the asthmatics; while it also causes a lot of
coughing with mucus.
“The brown tar that tobacco leaves in the lungs can cause emphysema (lung disease) and lung cancer,” physicians warn.
Smoking and fertility
According to the American Society for
Reproductive Medicine, cigarette smoking is harmful to a woman’s
ovaries, and the degree of harm is dependent upon the amount and the
period of time a woman smokes.
It says, “Smoking appears to accelerate
the loss of eggs and reproductive function and may advance the time of
menopause by several years. Components in cigarette smoke have been
shown to interfere with the ability of cells in the ovary to make
oestrogen and to cause a woman’s eggs to be more prone to genetic
abnormalities.”
A Professor of Reproductive
Endocrinology, Oladapo Ashiru, adds, “Smoking is strongly associated
with an increased risk of spontaneous miscarriage and possibly ectopic
pregnancy as well. Pregnant smokers are more likely to have low birth
weight babies and premature birth. “The incidence of sudden infant death
syndrome also increases in households where someone smokes.”
