Smoking is the number one cause of preventable disease and premature death in the world. It increases your risk of developing cancer, heart disease, and lung disease, as well as diabetes and dementia, and it can damage your bones, eyes and teeth.
Most smokers in the UK have successfully quit and are now ex-smokers, notes Sir Richard Peto, emeritus professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at the University of Oxford. “Although cigarette sales are only about a quarter of what they were in the 70s, smoking is still a cause of more than 20 per cent of all cancer deaths, and if you add up all the reliably known effects of other causes of cancer in the UK, the total risk from all of them together is still less than that from tobacco alone,” he says.
“Smoking harms nearly every organ in the body as a result of toxic chemicals entering the body and passing into the bloodstream,” explains Professor Sanjay Agrawal, consultant in respiratory and intensive care medicine at the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust. “The chemicals from smoking damage cells in a variety of ways, triggering inflammation.”
Social or light smoking isn’t without risks, either. “The more cigarettes someone smokes and the longer they smoke for, the greater the risk, but having just one or two cigarettes a day is not harmless. Even smoking occasionally can damage the heart and blood vessels and increase the risk of cancer.” If you used to smoke when you were younger, there are ways to minimise, or even reverse, the damage.
