As title said why does smoke cause so much damage to the cardiovascular system?
In the last year 3 acquaintances of mine had heart attack of some sort. The doctor said that smoke was the main reason for all 3 of them.
I read most chainsmokers die of heart attack instead of lung cancer but i don’t understand why.
In: Biology
Nicotine causes your blood vessels to constrict which limits the amount of blood to your organs. The constant constriction causes blood vessels to stiffen and are less likely to return to normal size. This causes prolonged damage to organs, especially the heart and brain.
A heart attack is what happens when something (a blood clot, a bit of fat/cholesterol/plaque, etc) blocks one the arteries that supply blood and nutrients to the heart. Smoking impacts this in two ways. First, it causes your blood to thicken and clot more easily, which means clots are more likely to form inside your blood vessels where they’re not supposed to. Second, it irritates the lining of your blood vessels, causing them to swell and become less flexible, which makes them narrower and easier to clog. This is also why smoking increases the risk of stroke, which is when the same thing happens to an artery leading to the brain.
It’s also worth mentioning that both of those effects are temporary. According to the CDC, the increased risk largely goes away within a year of quitting smoking. However, heart damage from actually having a heart attack is permanent.
So smoking causes a lot of issues in the body other than just with the lungs. It raises the blood pressure and can also lead to hardened arteries. Smoking also has an effect on LDL (bad) cholesterol going up. The combination of hardened arteries and bad cholesterol is a perfect recipe for clotting. Increased blood pressure helps these clots break off and move to the arteries supplying the heart tissue. Once that’s blocked, the person is now having a heart attack because the tissue is not receiving oxygen.
It is one of specific and very harmfull effects of smoking, not an aspect of some general effect.
There substances in tobacco smoke that are adsorbed into blood. Along with psychoactive nicotine, some undesirable substances mix with your blood.
Some of them are chemically active in the way that they change a component of blood called LDL cholesterol, whatever that is. They oxidize it.
When LDL cholesterol is oxidized, it becomes garbage. It is consumed by macrofages. Macrofages are white blood cells that attack cancer cells and other garbage.
Macrofages consume and digest garbage, and eventually die and turn into pus. A dead macrofage with some dozens of cholesterol bits inside is called a foam cell. LDL cholesterol pus is real fatty and foamy.
This pus gets chunky and sticks to the walls of blood vessels. It affects your brain, lungs and other muscles too, but heart’s blood supply is crucial.
You can’t sit on your heart and make it fall asleep. This muscle works hard 24/7 since before you were born.
A pus plaque in one of the vessels feeding heart may block it enough to make heart muscle slowly starve, exhaust itself and start dying.
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