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Smoking And High Blood Pressure
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Are you a smoker? How many
cigaretts you smoke every day? This article will show you how smoking affects your blood pressure
and some tips for you to quit smoking.
How does smoking
affects blood pressure. One study says that
smoking decreases blood pressure because smoking causes anorexia and person who smokes eat less
so his or her weight decreases, so the blood pressure decreases.
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How blood pressure is increased by
Smoking?
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Smoking injures blood vessel
walls and speeds up the process of hardening of the arteries (Atherosclerosis). So even though
it does not cause high blood pressure, smoking is bad for anyone, especially those with high
blood pressure. If you smoke, quit. If you don't smoke, don't start. Once you quit, your risk of
having a heart attack is reduced after the first year. So you have a lot to gain by
quitting.
Moreover, The nicotine in
cigarettes and other tobacco products causes your blood vessels to constrict and your heart to
beat faster, which temporarily raises your blood pressure. If you quit smoking or using other
tobacco products, you can significantly lower your risk of heart disease and heart attack, as
well as help lower your blood pressure.
It is fact that When you play
with fire, you get burned. When you smoke, you run the risk of getting burned inside and out.
Whether tobacco is smoked, chewed, or taken in by any other means, the nicotine in the tobacco
raises the blood pressure. The more you smoke, the higher the nicotine level is in your blood,
and the higher your blood pressure. This accounts to a large extent for the great increase in
brain attacks, heart attacks, and pain in the legs due to poor circulation (Claudication) in
smokers, sometimes leading to amputation.
Nicotine raises your blood
pressure by constricting your blood vessels. This occurs because the oxygen in your blood
decreases and because nicotine directly stimulates the production of a hormone, epinephrine
(also known as adrenaline), in the adrenal gland. Epinephrine raises blood pressure by
constricting blood vessels. After tobacco use raises blood pressure, you’re at risk of all the
medical consequences of high blood pressure, not to mention diseases associated with smoking,
such as mouth and lung cancer.
Numerous studies have shown
that smoking or chewing tobacco raises blood pressure and that when you stop using tobacco
products, your blood pressure falls. The latest such study in the Journal of Hypertension
(February 2002) comes from France. Out of 12,417 men who were current smokers, previous smokers,
and never smokers, current smokers had the highest prevalence of high blood pressure. Previous
smokers had a lower prevalence with the highest rate of high blood pressure in those who had
recently stopped and had smoked for the longest time. Those who had never started smoking had
the lowest prevalence of high blood pressure. Do you need more evidence than
that?
Even though this article is
extremely brief on the subject, you have enough proof and evidence of the hazards of tobacco and
enough helpful advice to quit smoking that you would have to be really careless not to stop
immediately, if not sooner. Those Drugs that have caused a small fraction of the illness and
death that tobacco can be blamed for have been taken off the market. So why are cigarettes still
sold legally and advertised in many of our most prestigious magazines and on TV? The answer to
that question lies squarely at the feet of government and the millions of dollars spent on
cigarettes that are turned around and used to influence that government.
Smoking affects blood
pressure by following means.
1-Smoking can lead to the build-up of plaque that clogs the blood
vessels that supply the heart with blood.
2-When you smoke, you inhale carbon monoxide. This decreases the
amount of oxygen your heart, brain, and other vital organs receive.
3-Smoking (Nicotine Produces epinepherine) constricts blood
vessels.
4_Smoking damages the linings of blood vessels and speeds up the
process of atherosclerosis.
How can you quit
smoking? Here are a couple of tips that may help you smoke less and lower your blood
pressure. 1- Limit how many cigarettes you're
going to smoke each day, and make it part of a schedule instead of just "lighting up" whenever
you feel like it.
2- When you feel the need for a cigarette, give yourself a task or
activity to take your mind off the craving. Keep a list of tasks/activities handy so you're ready
when the urge strikes. An activity can be as simple as playing a game of solitaire or cleaning a
night table drawer.
3- If you've found it difficult to stop smoking - even with nicotine
replacement therapy - then you'll be interested in a new French study that combined the nicotine
inhaler plus the patch. Together, the two aids provided greater success rates than the inhaler
alone.
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