Quitting Smoking and Heart Health
Quitting smoking might be one of the toughest tasks towards improving your heart health. However, it also results to some very powerful effects. If you are a smoker and you are wondering how you can improve your heart health as well as reduce your risk for heart disease, then you definitely have to quit smoking. Cigarette smoking results to major bodily damages, particularly to your heart, as well as the entire cardiovascular system. It not only puts you at a higher risk of developing heart disease but can also result to debilitating stroke or heart attack, peripheral artery disease or atherosclerosis.
In a nutshell, smoking inhibits the supply of oxygen to your heart, hence, putting more stress on it. It increases your pulse rate; makes your platelets stickier and in turn increases the chances of blood clots being formed, which can induce stroke. For people with an underlying heart disease, smoking is an acute heart stressor.
Smoking also damages your heart by increasing the build-up of plaques in your arteries. This in turn results to atherosclerosis. If atherosclerosis attacks the arteries responsible for supplying blood to your limbs, depriving them of enough oxygen, it results to peripheral artery disease. Such problems are worsened in the presence of other heart disease risk factors like high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.
If smoking does damage to your organs and systems, quitting smoking leaves your entire body feeling healthier. It reduces your chances of contracting stroke, heart disease as well as peripheral artery disease in addition to improving blood circulation and health. In fact, the benefits of quitting smoking start immediately when you stub out the last cigarette. Going a few weeks, months and years without smoking undo much of the harm that you had caused your heart while you were smoking.
Immediately after you quit smoking, your heart becomes less stressed as it gets enough oxygen supplies. After 20 minutes of smoking cessation, your heart rate is greatly lowered. Twelve hours of cessation is enough to bring down the carbon monoxide level in your body to normal.
During the first month of smoking cessation, your risk of getting a heart attack drops immensely as your lungs are now healthier and can, therefore supply more oxygen to your heart. If smoking cessation extends to a year, your risk of contracting heart disease decreases by 50% as most of the damage that you had done to your heart has been undone. After 5 to 15 years of being smoke free, your risk of getting stroke is reduced to that of a person who has been a non-smoker for his or her entire life.
Some of the long term benefits of quitting smoking are that you reduce the risk of contracting heart disease to that of a person who has never taken a single puff. In fact, most men who cease from smoking between 35-39 years of age are believed to add a bonus of 5 more years to their lifespan. For women within the same range, their lifespan is believed to increase by three more years. For both parties, those who cease from smoking between 65-69 years of age, the lifespan is increased by one more year.
The benefits of quitting smoking to your heart are hence undeniable. Some of them like improved breathing can be felt, the intangible ones manifest themselves in good health as well as living longer. Therefore, for the sake of your heart, it is high time that you quit from this deadly habit and never pick it up again.
If you are constantly sliding back in your attempts to quit smoking, you might find help in EZ Smoker or EZ Smoker reviews.
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