Women and Smoking
For more than 50 years, tobacco company advertisements have enticed women to smoke cigarettes. While their messages have offered glamor and thinness to women, these messages have also placed them at increased risk of cancer, heart disease, and problems associated with reproductive organs. The risk of cervical cancer, for instance, is higher in women who smoke than in those who don’t. A woman reduces her risk dramatically when she quits. Nicocure is a herbal supplement that will help you quit smoking.
According to a recent study, cigarettes are more dangerous to women than to men; women are more likely to develop lung cancer and to do so with fewer cigarettes. Already lung cancer has surpassed breast cancer as the most common cause of cancer death in women.
The risk of heart disease for women smokers who smoke more than 25 cigarettes per day is 500 percent higher than it is for nonsmokers. Even smoking one to four cigarettes per day doubles a woman’s risk for heart attack. It makes no difference if she smokes low- or high-nicotine cigarettes.
Smoking appears to cause women to begin menopause one to two years early. But former smokers start their menopause at about the same age as do women who have never smoked. Smoking also contributes to osteoporosis, a condition involving bone loss that particularly afflicts women. Current female smokers aged 35 and older are more than 10 times as likely to die of emphysema or chronic bronchitis than non female smokers.
Smoking and Pregnancy Although cigarette smoking is dangerous for all women, it presents special risks for pregnant women and their fetuses. Each year in the United States, approximately 50,000 miscarriages are attributed to smoking during pregnancy. On average, babies born to mothers who smoke weigh less than those born to nonsmokers, and low birth weight is correlated with many developmental problems. Pregnant women who stop smoking in the first three or four months of their pregnancies give birth to higher-birth-weight babies than do women who smoke throughout their pregnancies. Infant mortality rates are also higher among babies born to smokers.
Maternal smoking has long been linked to the increased risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). SIDS, or “crib death,” occurs when an infant, usually under 1 year of age, dies during its sleep for no apparent reason. The increased risk is associated with how much the mother smokes. Passive smoke has also been associated with significant increases in the risk of SIDS. This risk is increased in normal-weight infants, about twofold with passive smoke exposure, and about threefold when the mother smokes both during the pregnancy and after the baby is born. Infants who are born to mothers who smoke during pregnancy have more episodes of apnea and excessive sweating. We do not know exactly how smoking affects the infant during the pregnancy, but it has been suggested that smoking may influence the development of the nervous system.
One study found that daughters of women who smoked during pregnancy are four times more likely to begin smoking during adolescence and to continue smoking than the daughters of women who did not smoke while pregnant. The study suggests that nicotine, which crosses the placental barrier, may affect the female fetus during an important period of development so as to predispose the brain to the addictive influence of nicotine more than a decade later.
