Dear friends, after a period of a lot of studying, I am picking up where I left off. I hope that this entry finds you well.
I will continue with the list of “smoking related diseases” that have strong evidence to establish causality according to the surgeon general.
Cardiovascular (Heart and Blood Vessels) Diseases
1) Atherosclerosis (clogged arteries)
2) Coronary Heart Disease (heart attacks)
3) Cerebrovascular (Blood vessels in your Brain)à(stroke)
4) Abdominal aorta aneurysm
Respiratory Diseases
1) Pneumonia
2) Acute respiratory infections
3) Maternal smoking reduces lung function in infants
4) Airway and alveolar injury
5) Impaired lung growth in adolescents
6) Accelerated decline in lung function
7) Coughing, phlegm, wheezing, shortness of breath
8) Adolescent asthma
9) Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD)
Just a few words about some of these diseases. It seems unclear that smoking would affect your heart and blood vessels, but this is actually one of the scariest effects of smoking because it causes, heart attacks and strokes which is a big killer in the US.
Here are some images:
This is a clogged coronary artery under a microscope. You can how there’s no open center for blood to flow through. So a coronary artery is an artery that feeds the heart. If the coronary artery gets blocked, that’s when your heart cells die, and that’s a heart attack. (image from HMS Pathology Laboratory Notes)
In a similar way, a stroke, is when an artery going to the brain is clogged, and then a part of the brain dies. The black part in the middle is the dead brain cells. Smoking causes strokes. Image from: http://www.pathology.vcu.edu/WirSelfInst/neuro_medStudents/image/saved_green002.jpg
After talking and meeting patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), I've realized that it’s really a sad condition. Some have such a hard time breathing they can’t even talk. One patient had to breathe oxygen through nasal tubes for most of his day. Another patient once told me that he wished that he had known that smoking caused his COPD. I asked him to describe his shortness of breath and it’s literally as if you can’t breathe, and you can’t get enough air in your lungs. Imagining this sort of experience is very scary.
The past couple weeks we have been learning about infectious diseases and smoking increases your risk for getting infections like the flu because your lungs can't clear the bugs. Smoking essentially damages the cilia in your lungs that clear many bugs out of your lungs.
It seems like a laundry list (and there’s one more to come), and you might say to yourself, yeah, yeah, smoking is bad for you. But hopefully, it is becoming clear that smoking causes malfunction in almost all of your bodily systems. Especially those that mean the most, your heart, your brain, and your lungs.
British physician Sir Richard Doll once said:
“That so many diseases - major and minor - should be related to smoking is one of the most astonishing findings of medical research in this century.” (Lecture Notes)
3 comments:
Cool site! Been wondering what my med school/dr friends would think of some of the birth books I'm reading. Let me know when you get to OB stuff... and in your hopes to democratize your medical education, I have a lot of questions for your professors about some of the stats re: doctor and hospital intervention. Crazy stuff. If you can, watch the film "the business of being born" and let me know what you think of it all.
Hope you are well btw :)
where's week 5?
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