Most people understand that smoking affects the lungs along with practically every other organ in the human body and increases the risk of developing many various diseases.
- What Smoking Does To The Lungs
- How Bad Is Smoking Crack For Your Lungs Cancer
- How Does Smoking Affect Lungs
Smoking crack can cause swelling and bleeding in the lungs. It can lead to lung disease such as emphysema and even complete lung failure. The scary thing is crack damages the brain and nervous system even worse. I am a cocaine addict, although I only smoked crack once i was around many that did. Prolonged crack abuse and addiction may also result in severe lung problems. Repeated inhalations of this drug causes a number of pulmonary conditions, including respiratory problems, which are collectively called crack lung. When a person smokes crack, their lungs may become irritated and inflamed.
But certainly the one part of your body that is arguably the most affected by smoking is your lungs.
Let’s take a closer look at what exactly a smoking habit does to your lungs. How smoking affects the lungs.
Smoking prevents the cilia from doing their job so much of that bad stuff ends up right in your lungs. This is the main reason why smokers are more likely to have respiratory infections. Additionally smoking can damage the alveoli (air sacs in the lungs) and can cause the narrowing of air passageways.
What Smoking Does To The Lungs
Changes in Appearance
Because they’re continually pumped up with oxygen, normal and healthy lungs are plump and pink.
They may not be pretty to look at, but they’re clean and pure.
However, you can instantly recognize a smoker’s lungs on sight.
Smokers’ lungs are black.
The black color is because every time you inhale a cigarette, it deposits tar in your lungs.
Over time and after smoking lots of cigarettes every day, enough tar deposits build up inside the bronchioles until it is distributed throughout the entire lungs. On top of that, you may have separate dark spots from smoking related pollution, too.
Although it’s not as visible to the naked eye, there are a lot of tiny changes inside your lungs, too.
Your lungs have little hair-like structures called cilia, which act like gentle brushes to move particles through your lungs and help you to breathe better.
But smoking ultimately damages off those cilia, so you don’t get the same benefits they offered.
The cilia rest overnight when you don’t smoke, but eventually that damage can become permanent.
The Dreaded “Smoker’s Cough”
You’re probably familiar with the sound of an older person who has smoked for many years because they have a distinctive hacking cough, often called the “smoker’s cough.”
The smoker’s cough doesn’t just sound unpleasant – it’s also very uncomfortable for the one doing the coughing.
The chemicals in smoke, like hydrogen cyanide, irritate the lining of your bronchial passages and cause inflammation that leads to coughing.
Your lungs do work to try to remove the tar you inhale by smoking, by moving it out of the lungs through the bronchiole tubes and up into the trachea.
But nicotine paralyzes the cilia, so that causes the coughing because your lungs have to work that much harder.
Whatever irritants you can cough up comes out in the form of phlegm.
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease
Imagine never feeling like you can get enough air into your lungs, and how hard that would make it for you to breathe.
How Bad Is Smoking Crack For Your Lungs Cancer
That’s exactly what happens if you have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, which is a serious illness that’s believed to be caused by cigarette smoking.
Other conditions, particularly certain jobs like coal mining or working in an environment with very bad air quality, can also lead to COPD.
Emphysema is sometimes referred to as a separate illness from COPD, but emphysema is actually an early stage of the other disease and refers to changes that are occurring within the lungs.
Emphysema and chronic bronchitis are both associated with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and symptoms feel like extreme shortness of breath, wheezing, being unable to catch your breath and intense coughing.
Ultimately, COPD is really bad news, because it almost always gets gradually worse and results in death.
Lung Cancer
Lung cancer is the biggest bad news you can get when you’re a smoker.
Although some cases of lung cancer can be caused by other factors, like exposure to radon, asbestos and radiation, the vast majority of cases of lung cancer happen to smokers or people who live with smokers.
About 85 to 90 percent of people with lung cancer are current or former smokers.
Although lung cancer can be somewhat treatable when caught in the early stages, it’s often undiscovered until it’s too late because the symptoms are mistaken for allergies or other chronic respiratory symptoms associated with smoking.
Recovering Your Breath
Your lungs provide the literal breath of life, and they can do a lot to regenerate themselves when they’re exposed to damage.
But a regular smoking habit really takes a major toll on your lungs, and in many cases your lungs just can’t overcome the amount of damage.
Even though smoking affects the lungs, the good news is that your body has a big capacity to heal, and the sooner you quit smoking, the sooner you reduce the risk of damage to your lungs.
For further help, check out – How to Detox After Quitting Smoking – 9 Simple Tips.
Smoking can cause significant damage in your lungs that increases the longer you smoke. However, there’s hope that your lungs may heal after you quit smoking. In fact, there are a number of ways your lungs will show healing once you stop smoking.
4 Ways the Lungs Can Heal After Quitting Smoking
There are thousands of chemicals from smoking that can damage your lungs, and removing this source of damage by quitting smoking is the first step in allowing your lungs to heal. After you quit smoking, your lungs may begin to heal in 4 specific ways.
For one thing, the levels of carbon monoxide in your blood will gradually drop after you quit, which may relieve symptoms like shortness of breath. Quitting will also reduce inflammation that smoking causes in your airways and lungs. In addition, not smoking allows the cilia in your airways to heal and begin protecting your body from potentially harmful bacteria and particles again. Finally, you may also see significant increases in your overall lung function once you stop smoking, and increased lung function may also improve your circulation as well.
Though these 4 types of healing may take place in your lungs after you stop smoking, smoking may also cause serious long-term issues that may be incurable. For instance, smoking is known to increase your risk of developing various chronic lung diseases, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and emphysema. Therefore, quitting smoking is a vitally important step you should take as soon as possible.
Lung Health Institute Can Help Patients With Chronic Lung Diseases
How Does Smoking Affect Lungs
Our health care team at Lung Health Institute is here to help people who have developed chronic lung diseases as a result of smoking. In fact, we offer 2 treatment options that may benefit you greatly.
Our 3 customized Anti-Inflammatory Initiative™, or AI2™, plans include helpful lifestyle and nutrition instructions that can help you Breathe Easier™. For instance, these plans include a list of foods that may improve your lung health. They may also offer benefits such as boosting your immune system and training your body to use healthy fats to reduce inflammation.
A second treatment option we offer chronic lung disease patients is cellular therapy. Cellular therapy is a minimally invasive procedure, and it uses concentrated platelets and cells from your blood to target lung disease. The platelets and cells release healing properties that, when combined with highly concentrated proteins, growth factors and other helpful cells from your blood, may help to heal damaged tissue and reduce inflammation in your lungs.
Are you ready to find out if our treatment options can help treat your chronic lung disease? Contact one of our patient coordinators today for more information or to schedule a free consultation.