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Eyeing Smoking as a Serious Health Issues on Women's Day
 Increasing
awareness about women
health issues that
usually remain the last in the list of priorities in a family.
In all WHO regions except Europe, girls aged 13�15 years old are using tobacco
at higher rates than women aged 15 and older. An indication of the health storm
that will take over the world in near future. This could be a reflection of
aggressive tobacco industry marketing to girls, particularly in lower- and
middle-income countries. The high rates among girls is very concerning as these
data suggest potential substantial increases for women in the near future. Smoking and
tobacco use pose a serious risk of death and disease for women. Cigarette
smoking,
alone kills an estimated 173,940 women in the United States. Although fewer
women smoke than men, the percentage difference between the two has continued to
decrease. Today, with a much smaller gap between men's and women's smoking
rates, women share a much larger burden of smoking-related diseases.
Most of the increased mortality is due to lung
cancer,
head and neck cancer, COPD, heart
disease and
stroke, and shorter life expectancy by more than 10 years.
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Lung cancer is now the leading cancer killer among women. And of those deaths,
90 percent are attributed to tobacco dependence, according to Michael Fiore, MD,
director of the University of Wisconsin Center for Tobacco Research and
Intervention.
Quitting smoking at any age lowers the risk of death for smoking-related
diseases. And quitting before the age of 40 reduces the risk of death
associated with continued smoking by 90 percent.
Why Smoking Needs to be Controlled?
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 Handle
Infertility: If
you smoke for many years, or smoke many cigarettes per day, your risk for fertility problems
is increased. Fertility issues could range from Ovulation problems, Genetic
issues, Damage to reproductive organs, eggs or premature menopause, miscarriage,
along with increased risk of cancer and
increased risk of miscarriage. Smokers are also more likely to give birth to
babies with health problems.
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Evade Lung Cancer: In
2009, an estimated 70,490 women died of lung and bronchus cancer. Lung
cancer is likely to overtake breast cancer as the main cause of cancer death
among European women by the middle of this decade, according to new research
published in the cancer journal Annals
of Oncology on
February 13. In the UK and Poland it has already overtaken breast
cancer as the main cause of
cancer deaths in women. In 2013 there will be an estimated 88,886 deaths
(14.6 per 100,000 women) from breast cancer and 82,640 deaths (14 per
100,000 women) from lung cancer. Lung cancer deaths have risen by 7% among
women since 2009.
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Higher Blood Pressure: With
each cigarette, the blood pressure rises transiently and the pressor effect
may be missed if the blood
pressure is measured 30
minutes after the last smoke. The transient rise in blood pressure may be
most prominent with the first cigarette of the day even in habitual
smokers. About 30% of all deaths from heart disease in the U.S. are directly
related to cigarette smoking. That's because smoking is a major cause of
coronary artery disease, especially in younger people.
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Not a healthy option to
manage Body Weight:
Teenage girls often start to smoke to suppress appetite,
avoid weight
gain and to identify
themselves as independent and glamorous, without much realization of what
they are heading into. Smoking a single cigarette has been shown to induce a
3% rise in energy expenditure (EE) within 30 min. Besides its metabolic
properties, nicotine could induce an acute anorexic effect: during a 2-h
period, hunger and food consumption were negatively associated and satiety
and fullness were positively associated with increasing doses of nicotine.
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Kids less likely to smoke:
The number one predictor for teenagers and smoking is having a parent who
smokes,� says Blatt. They learn by example, so do them and yourself a favor
by committing to quit as soon as possible.
Although overall smoking prevalence declined slightly since 2005, it was 19.0%
in 2011, higher than the HP2020 target of 12% for all U.S. adults.
This underscores the need for more extensive implementation of evidence-based
interventions, such as those outlined in the World Health Organization's MPOWER package.
These include increasing the price of tobacco products, implementing smoke-free
laws in workplaces and public places, warning about the dangers of tobacco use
with antitobacco media campaigns, increasing access to help quitting, and
enforcing restrictions on tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship. Such
population-based interventions have been shown to reduce population smoking
prevalence as well as overall smoking intensity (i.e., CPD)
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Dated 09 March 2013
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