SPECIAL SITUATIONS OR CONDITIONS

Studies suggest that everyone can quit smoking. Your situation or condition can give you a special reason to quit:

• Pregnant women/new mothers: By quitting, you protect your baby's health and your own.

Most researchers would now agree that prospective mothers who smoke during pregnancy may well be committing inadvertent child abuse. If there is one group of smokers who should most definitely quit smoking – it is pregnant women.

If all efforts fail at quitting, pregnant women should at the very least:

1)  Reduce their smoking to five or less low-tar cigarettes per day

2)  Supplement their diet with extra portions of milk, eggs, and cheese during their pregnancy.

• Hospitalized patients: By quitting, you reduce your health problems and heal faster. 

Smokers spend 27 percent more time in the hospital and more than twice as much time in intensive care units as nonsmokers.

• Heart attack patients: By quitting, you reduce your risk of a second heart attack.

From the moment smoke reaches your lungs, your heart is forced to work harder. Your pulse quickens, forcing your heart to beat an extra 10 to 25 times per minute, as many as 36,000 additional times per day. Because of the irritating effect of nicotine and other components of tobacco smoke, your heartbeat is more likely to be irregular. This can contribute to cardiac arrhythmia, and many other serious coronary conditions, such as heart attack. A recent Surgeon General’s report estimated that about 170,000 heart attacks each year are caused by smoking.

• Lung problems and cancer risk: By quitting, you reduce your chance of cancer.

The lining of your bronchi begins to thicken, predisposing you to cancers of the bronchi. Most lung cancers arise in the bronchial lining.

From your very first puff, the smoke begins to chip away at your lung’s natural defenses. Continued exposure can completely paralyze the lungs’ natural cleansing process.

Your respiratory rate increases, forcing your lungs to work harder.

Irritating gases produce chemical injury to the tissues of your lungs and the airways leading to the lungs. This speeds up the production of mucus and leads to an increased tendency to cough up sputum.

This excess mucus serves as a breeding ground for a wide variety of bacteria and viruses. The makes you more susceptible to colds, flu, bronchitis, and other respiratory infections. And if you do come down with an infection, your body will be less able to fight it, because smoking impairs the ability of the white blood cells to resist invading organisms.

The lining of your bronchi begins to thicken, predisposing you to cancers of the bronchi. Most lung cancers arise in the bronchial lining.

Farther down, inside your lungs, the smoke weakens the free-roving scavenger cells that remove foreign particles from the air sacs of the lungs. Continued smoke exposure adversely affects elastin (the enzyme that keeps your lungs flexible), predisposing you to emphysema.

Many of the compounds you inhale are deposited as a layer of sticky tar on the lining of your throat and bronchi and in the delicate air sacs of your lungs. A pack-a-day smoker pours about eight ounces—the one full cup—of tar into his or her lungs each year. This tar is rich in cancer-producing chemicals, including radioactive poloniumm 210.

• Parents of children and adolescents: By quitting, you protect your children and adolescents from illnesses caused by second-hand smoke. 

Many smokers feel guilty about their habit. And this feeling increases the longer they smoke. And smokers who have children at home feel the guiltiest because they are 'polluting' the air their children breathe. Guilt can often turn into self-hatred.

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