Cigarette smoke contains about 4,000 different chemicals which can damage the cells and systems of the

human body. These include at least 80 chemicals that can cause cancer (including tar, arsenic, benzene, cadmium and formaldehyde) nicotine (a highly addictive chemical which hooks a smoker into their habit) and hundreds of other poisons such as cyanide, carbon monoxide and ammonia. Every time a smoker inhales, these chemicals are drawn into the body where they interfere with cell function and cause problems ranging from cell death to genetic changes which lead to cancer. This is why tobacco smoking is a known or probable cause of approximately 25 diseases. According to WHO figures, smoking is responsible for approximately five million deaths worldwide every year. However it also contributes to, or aggravates many other diseases and may play a part in many more deaths. Even the WHO says that its impact on world health isnt fully assessed. WHO says smoking is a greater cause of death and disability than any single disease. By 2020, the WHO expects the worldwide death toll to reach 10 million, causing 17.7 per cent of all deaths in developed countries. There are believed to be 1.1 billion smokers in the world, 800 million of them in developing countries.

Smokers who quit while still young can live almost as long as people who never smoked, new Canadian research has found. While its estimated that smoking cuts at least 10 years off a persons lifespan, new analysis from researchers at Torontos St. Michaels Hospital finds that people who quit smoking before the age of 40 regain almost all of those potentially lost years. The most important message is that quitting works, lead researcher Dr. Prabhat Jha told CTV News. Cessation of smoking at an early age -- even up to age 40 -- avoids about 90 per cent of the risk of continuing to smoke.

Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/smokers-who-quit-by-40-can-live-almost-aslong-as-non-smokers-study-1.1126619#ixzz2KBGlaH1R

Risk factors of smoking

People take up smoking for a variety of reasons. Young people are especially vulnerable because of pressure from their peers and the image that smoking is clever, cool or 'grownup'. Just trying a few cigarettes can be enough to become addicted.

Many people say that smoking helps them to feel more relaxed or cope with stress but nicotine is a stimulant not a relaxant, so it doesnt help stress. What people are describing is more likely to be relief from their craving or withdrawal symptoms.
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Smoking damage
There are hundreds of examples and volumes of research showing how cigarette smoking damages the body. For example, UK studies show that smokers in their 30s and 40s are five times more likely to have a heart attack than non-smokers. Smoking contributes to coronary artery disease (atherosclerosis or hardening of the arteries) where the hearts blood supply becomes narrowed or blocked, starving the heart muscle of vital nutrients and oxygen, resulting in a heart attack. As a result smokers have a greatly increased risk of needing complex and risky heart bypass surgery. Smoking also increases the risk of having a stroke, because of damage to the heart and arteries to the brain. If you smoke for a lifetime, there is a 50 per cent chance that your eventual death will be smoking-related - half of all these deaths will be in middle age.
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Smoking and lung problems

Smoking does enormous damage to the lungs, especially because these tissues are in the direct firing line for the poisons in smoke. As a result there is a huge increase in the risk of lung cancer, which kills more than 20,000 people in the UK every year. US studies have shown that men who smoke increase their chances of dying from the disease by more than 22 times. Women who smoke increase this risk by nearly 12 times. Lung cancer is a difficult cancer to treat - long term survival rates are poor.

Many teenagers and adults think that there are no effects of smoking on their bodies until they reach middle age. 1 Smoking-caused lung cancer, other cancers, heart disease, and stroke typically do not

occur until years after a person's first cigarette. However, there are many serious harms from smoking that occur much sooner. In fact, smoking has numerous immediate health effects on the brain and on the respiratory, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, immune and metabolic systems. While these immediate effects do not all produce noticeable symptoms, most begin to damage the body with the first cigarette sometimes irreversibly and rapidly produce serious medical conditions and health consequences. Rapid Addiction from Early Smoking Many teenagers and younger children inaccurately believe that experimenting with smoking or even casual use will not lead to any serious dependency. In fact, the latest research shows that serious symptoms of addiction such as having strong urges to smoke, feeling anxious or irritable, or having unsuccessfully tried to not smoke can appear among youths within weeks or only days after occasional smoking first begins.

The average smoker tries their first cigarette at age 12 and may be a regular smoker by age 14. Every day, more 3,500 kids try their first cigarette and about 1,000 other kids under 18 years of age become new regular, daily smokers. Almost 90 percent of youths that smoke regularly report seriously strong cravings, and more than 70 percent of adolescent smokers have already tried and failed to quit smoking.

Immediate and Rapid Effects on the Brain Part of the addictive power of nicotine comes from its direct effect on the brain. In addition to the wellunderstood chemical dependency, cigarette smokers also show evidence of a higher rate of behavioral problems and suffer the following immediate effects:

 Increases Stress. Contrary to popular belief, smoking does not relieve stress. Studies have shown that on average, smokers have higher levels of stress than non-smokers. The feelings of relaxation that smokers experience while they are smoking are actually a return to the normal unstressed state that non-smokers experience all of the time.