Smoking & Heart Disease

Both smokers and non-smokers have heard these phrases many times, “Smoking is the No 1 Preventable cause of Heart Disease” and “Smoking is the No 1 cause of Premature Death.” What does this actually mean?

Smoking denotes the use of tobacco as cigarettes, cigar or pipe smoking. These forms of smoking introduce harmful chemicals or elements into our body. So if you really consider it, this is a form of committing suicide. Those harmful chemicals will slowly destroy one or many components of your body, leading to cancer, stroke or heart disease and even death..

“Preventable” refers to an outcome that can be avoided by specific actions. For example to prevent road accidents, the authorities have introduced road safety rules such as speed limits and traffic lights. In this manner, the number of accidents occurring may be reduced. Prevention on the other hand is an active word, indicating that an individual needs to perform an action. For example, the causes of heart disease are classified as preventable and non-preventable. Non-preventable causes are those that you cannot do anything about. This includes genetic susceptibility, gender of an individual and age (as the older an individual becomes – the higher the chance for that individual to have heart disease).

Preventable causes include having diabetes and/or hypertension, poor lifestyle habits, high cholesterol and smoking. What research tells us is that smoking is the No 1 cause of these preventable conditions. So the action required is to stop smoking, which will reduce your chance of having heart disease. Heart disease not only kills you, it is also very expensive. Instead of spending time with your family or visiting places, your poor health will confine you to your home or the hospital. This may not pose a problem for a rich person when health is compromised. For the poor and middle-income groups, all that money that you saved for your children or to get that dream house is now given to both the hospital and the doctor to treat your heart disease. You will look back and say to yourself, “I worked so hard all these years just to give my money to the doctor – what a waste of my life!”

Death knocks on everyone’s door. Sooner or later we will all die. However, we need not die so early in life, nor should we suffer and die. There are many things that we want to accomplish in life before we leave this world of ours. It could be completing our education, settling on a good vocation that allows us financial freedom, allowing our love life to grow into a marriage and raise a family.

However death can strike and curtail all these pleasures and this could be from smoking. I finding it interesting to see individuals who ensure that their house and their environments are safe yet allow death to lurk around in the form of smoking. Research has shown that by smoking there is a higher chance of death knocking on your door early.

In conclusion, I strongly urge you to love yourself and your family by completely giving up the use of tobacco. That decision will allow you to live long, avoid expensive and deadly heart disease and prevent you from giving all your earnings to the doctor or hospital. Enjoy life to the fullest. Stop smoking completely.

Dr. Edward Nathan is a public health specialist working in Penang. Happy World Heart Day!

"Prevention is better than cure" 
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