How Many Ways Does Smoking Harm You?

Tobacco use is the single largest cause of preventable cause of death in the United States.
On average people who smoke die about 10 years sooner than non-smokers. The New England Journal of Medicine.

Smoking triples the risk for cataracts and is also a risk factor for macular degeneration and its response to treatment. Dr. Nicholas Volpe, Tarry Professor and Chairman Department of Opthalmology Feinberg School of Medicine Northwestern University

The American Cancer Society estimates that in 2014 about 224,000 new cases of lung cancer and 159,260 cancer deaths caused by tobacco use. The overall survival rate for those with lung cancer, sadly, remains at around 15%. You have less than one chance in six of surviving.


We know a lot more than we used to about the dangers of tobacco smoke. “When you smoke, you inhale thousands of hazardous chemicals,” explains Dr. Michele Bloch, a tobacco control expert at NIH. “They travel all around inside your body and cause damage to numerous parts.”



Cigarettes contain about 600 ingredients. When they burn, they generate more than 7,000 chemicals, according to the American Lung Association. Many of those chemicals are poisonous and at least 69 of them can cause cancer.



Writing in this blog for nearly six years, one of the things I have learned irrevocably is that smoking cripples the body in more ways than I ever imagined.

“‘While we were aware that smoking is a risk factor for respiratory disease, cancer, and cardiovascular disease, this study shows it also has a detrimental effect on cognitive aging and this is evident as early as 45 years,’ said Severine Sabia of University College London, who led the study and published it in the Archives of General Psychiatry Journal.



Smoking harms nearly every organ of the body. Smoking causes many diseases and reduces the health of smokers in general.

Smoking causes death
• The adverse health effects from cigarette smoking account for an estimated 443,000 deaths, or nearly one of every five deaths, each year in the United States and cost the country a staggering $130 billion in health care costs and lost productivity.
• More deaths are caused each year by tobacco use than by all deaths from human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), illegal drug use, alcohol use, motor vehicle injuries, suicides, and murders combined.
• Smoking causes an estimated 90% of all lung cancer deaths in men and 80% of all lung cancer deaths in women.
• An estimated 90% of all deaths from chronic obstructive lung disease are caused by smoking.
Each link is a blog post enumerating damage to the body from smoking besides lung cancer.