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posted by janrinok on Friday February 13 2015, @11:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-never-good-news dept.

"Who still smokes?" as Denise Grady reports at the NYT that however bad you thought smoking was, it’s even worse. A new study has found that in addition to the well-known hazards of lung cancer, artery disease, heart attacks, chronic lung disease and stroke, researchers found that smoking was linked to significantly increased risks of infection, kidney disease, intestinal disease caused by inadequate blood flow, and heart and lung ailments not previously attributed to tobacco. “The smoking epidemic is still ongoing, and there is a need to evaluate how smoking is hurting us as a society, to support clinicians and policy making in public health,” says Brian D. Carter, an author of the study. “It’s not a done story.” Carter says he was inspired to dig deeper into the causes of death in smokers after taking an initial look at data from five large health surveys being conducted by other researchers. As expected, death rates were higher among the smokers but diseases known to be caused by tobacco accounted for only 83 percent of the excess deaths in people who smoked. “I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really low,’ ” Mr. Carter said. “We have this huge cohort. Let’s get into the weeds, cast a wide net and see what is killing smokers that we don’t already know.” The researchers found that, compared with people who had never smoked, smokers were about twice as likely to die from infections, kidney disease, respiratory ailments not previously linked to tobacco, and hypertensive heart disease, in which high blood pressure leads to heart failure. "The Surgeon General's report claims 480,000 deaths directly caused by smoking, but we think that is really quite a bit off," concludes Carter adding that the figure may be closer to 540,000.

 
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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday February 14 2015, @08:27AM

    by Rosco P. Coltrane (4757) on Saturday February 14 2015, @08:27AM (#144900)

    The idiots that are not dead yet.

    It's true that smoking is an idiotic life choice, on the face of it. But hear my little story: I smoked for decades. I quit for good about 2 years ago, because I replaced smoking with vaping. My e-liquids contain nicotine. If I vape e-liquids without nicotine, I crave. Therefore, it's pretty clear that I am an nicotine addict, and I need to vape to stay off cigarettes. Believe me, I've tried to quit before - and at least once, I managed to stay off cigarettes for 3 years - but the cravings make every day hell on Earth.

    I started smoking when I was 11. I've read studies that seem to demonstrate that, when you start before a certain age (18 years old I think), exposure to nicotine physically changes something in the brain that makes it much, much harder to quit and stay off cigarettes as an adult. For me at least, that seems to fit: I just can't live well without nicotine.

    Now then, the question is: am I an idiot?

    When I started smoking at 11 years old, I was a kid who wanted to "be cool" like the big kids. Sure at that time, there were anti-tobacco campaigns already, and my parents had warned me. But kids are kids, and kids do stupid things, especially when they're forbidden. Was I an idiot when I was 11? No, I was a kid who did something stupid with life-changing consequences.

    Then from the time I was hooked to the time I quit thanks to vaping, I've made many, many honest tries to quit - and more importantly, stay off. No matter how hard I tried, I always went back to smoking. Was I an idiot? Possibly, but there's something physical in me that *requires* nicotine, and it's just so damn hard!

    I'm not looking for excuses: my smoking - and my current addiction to vaping for the nicotine - is entirely my own fault. But it's too easy to call smokers idiots, implying that they're totally in control of the choice they make to destroy themselves. They're not. At least not entirely.

    It's not a simple Darwin award thing, where you can choose to do something stupid or not, and if you do, you deserve what you get. Addictions are a lot more complex than that. People who call addicts idiots usually have never been confronted to an addiction problem themselves, otherwise they'd know better.

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