What Is a Heart Attack?
A heart attack happens when a person's heart muscle stops beating. You need to get oxygen to your heart to keep it alive. If a person's heart stops for too long, severe damage to the heart muscle can result. Smaller versions of heart attacks, or infarctions, may not cause immediate death, but a heart will develop excessive scar tissue in the place of normal tissue. A person needs a certain amount of normal heart tissue and muscle for it to work properly. Smoking causes a wide array of heart-related diseases because it can promote the degeneration of the cells.
What Happens?
Smoking can cause a heart attack because the toxic substances found in tobacco, including carbon monoxide and nicotine, can cause the arteries to harden. It can also inhibit much needed bloodflow to vital organs. When a person smokes a cigarette, carbon monoxide reduces a person's ability to receive oxygen. The lungs and the respiratory system become swollen and damaged, too. After many years, arteries tend to narrow and blood clots will form along the arterial wall. Atherosclerosis and coronary thrombosis can result from prolonged cigarette smoking. If a blood clot forms in the body, it can block flow of blood to the heart causing a heart attack. The potential chest pain that could result is called an angina.
Smoking Creates Added Stress
Under normal circumstances, blood develops in the bone marrow and is later sent through the body by the heart. The kidneys act as a natural filter for toxic substances that get into a person's body. Smoking causes the build up of too many catacholomines in the blood stream. This severely inhibits the kidneys from being able to do their job. The excitation of the adrenal gland caused by smoking produces stress hormones, such as cortisol and other catacholomines, that are released as a protective mechanism. You can think of this in terms of stress reaction. Substances in cigarettes cause the body to react as if it is under stress--hormones get released to fight adverse affects of stress. All this activity promotes other chemical reactions in the body that ultimately cause heart attacks later. Smoking causes the protective mechanisms in the body to essentially have the reverse affect for which they were intended.
Tags: heart attack, Smoking causes, carbon monoxide, cause heart, heart attacks