How does smoking cause heart and blood vessel disease?
Smoking is one of the major cause of heart disease. The nicotine in tobacco smoke raises your blood pressure by constricting your blood vessels and making your heart work faster. This makes your heart work harder. It needs oxygen to do this extra work. But cigarette smoke contains carbon monoxide, a poisonous gas. Carbon monoxide cuts down the oxygen reaching your heart by up to 15 percent. Nicotine promotes fat build-up on the walls of your arteries, damaging them and decreasing blood flow, resulting in heart disease and heart attack. No wonder smoking doubles your risk of dying of a heart attack! Smoking also causes direct injury to your artery walls and promotes fat build-up in them. You may experience circulation problems such as cold feet, occasional pins and needles, and numbness in the leg. At an advanced stage, the disease may result in gangrene, which could lead to the amputation of your legs. Nineteen out of twenty people suffering from this disabling disease are cigarette sm
