However we often fail to remember how much what we consume affects us. Cigarettes, which are universally acknowledged to take a toll on our lungs, are an item that can hinder our appearance as well. Whether we are simply social smokers or chain smokers, we may be doing damage to more than our lungs.

Recent research carried out by dermatologists has shown that people addicted to smoking cigarettes have around five times as many wrinkles as those who do not indulge in the habit. Experts, noting that some studies have even proven that cigarettes yield a stronger effect than sunrays, say: “If you don’t want to experience early aging, quit smoking!”

Dull, wrinkled, dirty-gray skin, recognized by many as being “smokers’ skin,” is a phenomenon experienced by 79 percent of smokers, says Dr. Bayram Börekçi, a skin and venereal diseases expert. He explains; “Some of the symptoms we see on smokers’ faces include permanent lines and wrinkles, as well as a collapsed facial expression resulting from the protruding bones underneath the skin.

We also see thinning skin, a light-gray appearance, as well as a light orange/purple/red coloring. The ‘cigarette addict’s face’ is the same face seen on women over the age of 70. It is worth noting that people addicted to cigarettes start getting wrinkles very early. The amount of wrinkling is parallel to the number of cigarettes smoked over the course of a year.

Some of the factors which lead to the formation of wrinkles on the skin as a result of cigarette smoking are the widening veins due to the stimulation of the nervous system by nicotine, the reduction of oxygen in soft tissues, the increase in clotting and the reduction of collagen.”

Börekçi, mentioning the toxic, mechanical and genetic effects of smoking, notes that the reduction of moisture in smokers’ skin is connected with the toxic effect of cigarettes. The doctor also notes that the wrinkling seen around the lips of some smokers is a result of the “mechanic” effects of cigarette smoking, the muscles used when actually inhaling smoke.

He notes: “Many people believe that there are also genetic factors at play here, as not all cigarette smokers have a ‘cigarette addict’s face.’ The elasticity layer in the parts of bodies which are not regularly exposed to the sun in cigarette smokers are, when compared to the same areas of the body in non-smokers, much thicker and more fragmented. The chronic reduction of oxygen to the skin also reduces the synthesis of collagen, making visible wrinkles emerge.”

He went on: “Cigarettes can cause a variety of anti-estrogen effects, such as infertility, early menopause and menstrual irregularities. The physiological effects and importance of estrogen to the skin can be seen clearly in the post-menopausal period. In women who are addicted to cigarettes, the hypo-estrogen situation that is brought about shows itself in dry skin and wrinkles. Cigarettes reduce the levels of vitamin A in the body, which means that the cells have a greatly reduced level of protection against their number-one enemy, free radicals. This too makes it easier for wrinkles to appear. In people who already have white or grey hair, there is a yellowish color that appears in the hair because of the tar in cigarettes. The same sort of yellowish-brown color appears on the fingers and fingernails of people who smoke. This is called a ‘nicotine stain.’ The insides of smokers’ mouths are darker than other people’s mouths. In fact, sometimes the insides of the cheeks develop a tough, irregular whitish film. The fact that veins become narrower as a result of smoking means that it is harder for wounds to heal. It has been shown that even smoking just one cigarette can have the effect of narrowing veins for up to 90 minutes. There are more than 4,000 chemical elements found in cigarette smoke, although it is mostly nicotine, which is responsible for the decrease in the flow of blood.”

So bearing all this mind, you might want to ask yourself: Is enjoying a cigarette really worth all this potential physiological damage you could be dealing yourself?

Source:  FAT?H KARAKILIÇ,  Women

Some of the damage that cigarettes inflict on the body subsides quickly, halving the risk of heart disease and stroke within five years after a smoker quits. But the effect of smoking on risks of cancer and other diseases can persist for decades, experts say.

Even Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), 71, who quit smoking in 1980, still faces some increased risk of cancer from smoking two packs a day for 25 years, studies suggest. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), 46, who says he has struggled to stay off cigarettes since quitting last year, may have less long-term risk because he smoked fewer cigarettes per day.

Better to quit young

A major message of the research is that people who quit at a young age are far better off than those who put it off until later. Obama and McCain, both of whom waited until their mid-40s to quit, would have been measurably better off if they had stopped a decade sooner, experts said.

“If you quit by age 35, by the time you’re 45 you look pretty much like a never-smoker in most of our profiles of risk,” said Terry Pechacek, associate director for science at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s office on smoking and health.

The danger intensifies as smokers approach their 30th year of addiction, Pechacek said. The risk of getting lung cancer for a person who has smoked for 30 years can be six times greater than the risk for someone who has smoked for 20 years.

Some of smoking’s effects may be irreversible. For example, the chronic bronchitis that many smokers develop heals only partially. And quitting cigarettes often has little effect on emphysema, which stems from the damage that cigarette smoke can cause in the lung’s fine structures.

“That stuff doesn’t repair itself,” said Dr. Norman Edelman, chief medical officer for the American Lung Association.

Getting other risks down to normal can take time. A study published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that among women who smoked for 20 years on average, it took 30 years after quitting for their risk of lung cancer to reach normal levels.

Yet heart disease risks declined much more rapidly, the study found. Within five years of quitting, the excess risk from smoking had fallen by 61 percent.

“Clearly there are immediate benefits for some diseases,” said study co-author Stacey Kenfield, a researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health. “It’s never too late to stop.”

Cancer risks are more difficult to get back to normal because of how that disease progresses in the body, experts said.
Genetic damage

Each cigarette has the potential to inflict small bits of genetic damage that can accumulate over time and cause cancer later in a smoker’s life. The longer a person smokes, the more cells get damaged, and the longer it takes for the body’s repair mechanisms to remove the damaged cells.

Climbing a mountain

Pechacek of the CDC compared the process to climbing a mountain; smoking more cigarettes takes a person farther up the slope. “If you smoke too long, [you] may not have enough years left to get back down to the base,” he said.

One measure of an ex-smoker’s risk is expressed in “pack-years,” the number of packs smoked per day multiplied by the number of years a smoker was addicted. McCain, who smoked two packs a day for 25 years, would have about 50 pack-years, while Obama, who smoked less than one pack a day for about as long, would have fewer than 25 pack-years.

A risk calculator

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York has posted an online lung cancer prediction calculator (at mskcc.org/mskcc/html/12463.cfm) that uses pack-years and other information to assess an ex-smoker’s risk of developing cancer. Some researchers have debated the usefulness of pack-years in such predictions, arguing that overall duration of smoking matters more than the number of cigarettes smoked.

Like many smokers who try to kick the addiction, Obama says he has suffered smoking relapses since first attempting to quit last year. Such setbacks are less important than the ultimate goal, Pechacek said.

“Usually it takes three or four quits before a person is successful,” he said. “We need to stop looking at those as failures, because really they’re steps toward success. You’re building the skills you need to quit.”

Source:  Jeremy Manier | Chicago Tribune

Ministry national director of tobacco control Ashley Bloomfield said half of the smokers who had quit in the past three-and-a-half years would have died as a result of their smoking.

“Those smokers who die from a smoking-related illness lose of average 15 years of life compared to non-smokers,” said Dr Bloomfield.

But Hospitality Association chief executive Bruce Robertson is disputing that where there is smoke there is fire - saying most New Zealanders would look at the statistics and think: “Really?”

Mr Robertson, whose organisation represents the bar industry, said the 75,000 figure had “little credibility” and it was hard to establish such outcomes from “very small surveys”.

He said the industry had worked hard to make the new rules work.

Dr Bloomfield said cigarette consumption had halved in the past 18 years, to around 1000 cigarettes per adult each year, down from a high of around 2000 cigarettes in 1990.The Health Ministry’s focus was now on nicotine replacement therapy products. All medical practitioners now have prescribing rights, including GPs, midwives, dentists and optometrists.

The national budget for subsidising nicotine replacement therapy for the 2007-08 year was $4.5million, an increase from $2.5million the year before.

“Evidence has shown that using nicotine replacement therapy can double a smoker’s chance of quitting long term, regardless of the type of support they are receiving,” Dr Bloomfield said.

Smokers can register for Quit Cards which enable them to obtain an eight-week supply of nicotine patches and/or gum from their local pharmacy for a subsidised cost of between $10 and $20.

The programme will be expanded to include a nicotine lozenge later this year.

Quitline spokesman Robert Brewer said between 32-35,000 people register for nicotine replacement therapy every year.

When the ban on smoking in bars took effect in December 2004, calls to the Quitline doubled.

“December is usually our lightest month because of Christmas,” he said.

Source: By GREER McDONALD - The Dominion Post

But there’s one item strangely absent from the list, the one that causes more preventable deaths than any other product. A powerful and well-funded lobby has managed to keep tobacco off the list of federally regulated products for more than 40 years after the first surgeon general’s report linked smoking to cancer. Even today, a simple list of ingredients is not required for tobacco products.

Tobacco companies have taken advantage of this lack of oversight and have shamelessly marketed to underaged recruits through cartoon advertising, nicotine and ingredient manipulation, fruity flavors, free giveaways at rock concerts, and ads in publications with high teen readership.

In 1996, the Food and Drug Administration assumed the authority to regulate tobacco as a consumable product and published rules regarding this regulation. Some basic common-sense approaches were proposed in those rules, including ways to prohibit the sale and marketing of tobacco to children. However, the Supreme Court ruled that only Congress could give the FDA authority to regulate tobacco.

Twelve years later, we continue to wait for Congress to take action regarding this lone unregulated product. We submit to you that this is 12 years too long.

Currently being considered by Congress, the Family Smoking Prevention and Control Act, S. 625 and H.R. 1108, would give the U.S. Food and Drug Administration the authority to regulate tobacco products the way drugs, devices, and foods are currently regulated.The American Cancer Society encourages all members of Congress to stand up and be counted on this issue. We cannot afford another 12 years of inaction.

Clanton is chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society, High Plains Division, which includes Oklahoma. He is former deputy director for the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health.

Source: Mark Clanton, M.D., The Oklahoman

For a long time, many cigarette companies used ammonia during the manufacturing process to inflate the volume of tobacco, accentuate certain flavors, or even get rid of a few carcinogens. But in the early 1960s, according to Terrell Stevenson and Robert Proctor, Philip Morris started using ammonia to freebase the nicotine in cigarette smoke, creating a form of “crack nicotine” that delivered a speedier, sharper kick, and essentially allowed Philip Morris to keep rolling out addictive cigarettes while lowering tar and nicotine levels to allay public fears.

As it happens, Philip Morris first perfected its ammonia trick with Marlboros, which quickly rose from being a bit player to becoming the most dominant cigarette brand on the market, which forced all the other manufacturers to scramble to figure out Philip Morris’s secret. (They did, eventually.) Over the last decade, as the industry has come under fire for manipulating nicotine levels to keep customers hooked, Philip Morris has managed to defend itself by noting that ammonia has all sorts of more innocuous uses and couldn’t possibly be playing a role here. I guess we’ll see if this new paper kicks the last legs out from under that defense.

Source: Bradford Plumer, The New Republic

These illnesses cause 930,000 deaths worldwide each year, in addition to more than five million smoking-related deaths estimated by the World Health Organisation as being caused by diseases such as lung cancer, which have long been linked to smoking.

Scotland’s health minister and anti-smoking campaigners have welcomed the study as further proof of the need to clamp down on the habit.

About 13,000 Scots a year die of lung cancer and other smoking-related diseases, such heart illnesses. Another 1,600 people die in Scotland each year from the cancers newly linked to the habit.

The Scottish Government last month unveiled controversial new plans to curb smoking, by proposing a ban on cigarettes being displayed in shops. And ministers south of the border have suggested scrapping packs of 10 cigarettes because of their popularity among young smokers.

The new study, which has been published in the journal Annals of Oncology, was carried out by a team led by experts at Glasgow University and was based on data from 17,363 male civil servants based in London.Information about their health and habits has been collated since the 1960s in an effort to gain information about health trends and find links between lifestyle and illness. The original link between smoking and lung cancer was found through similar analysis of medical data.

The study found:

• A 43% increase in the chances of dying from cancer of the colon if the person smokes.

• A 40% higher likelihood of dying from rectal cancer.

• An increase of 23% in the chances of losing one’s life to prostate cancer.

• A 53% rise in mortality from lymphatic leukaemia among smokers.

The study concluded: “Cigarette smoking appears to be a risk factor for several malignancies of previously unclear association with tobacco use.”

Dr David Batty, of the Medical Research Council Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, based at the University of Glasgow, said: “What this study shows is that smoking is linked to more kinds of cancer than previously thought. It’s important to remember that cancer is not a single disease and that the various kinds of cancers are different illnesses so you couldn’t necessarily assume that smoking was linked to them in the same way. What’s unclear is how exactly smoking causes these cancers.”

Health Minister Shona Robison said: “This study appears to demonstrate that smoking is even more carcinogenic than was realised.

It also underlines the importance of Scotland’s smoking ban in public places, which is helping to safeguard the health of thousands of people working in previously smoky environments.”

Sheila Duffy, chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health Scotland, said: “This large-scale study adds to the weight of existing research confirming the harmfulness of smoking. It’s vital that smokers receive support and encouragement to quit and as a nation we take steps to ensure future generations avoid getting hooked on this lethal and highly addictive substance.”

Ed Yong, health information manager at Cancer Research UK, said: “The dangers of cigarette smoke go far beyond its well-known link to lung cancer. It’s interesting to see that even after 50 years of research, studies are still revealing new dangers.”

However, one leading medical experts questioned the conclusions.

Fouad Habib, professor of experimental urology at Edinburgh University, and an expert in prostate cancer, said: “This study is bit of a surprise and very much the first of its kind. Until now it’s not been thought that there was any link between smoking and prostate cancer and I would have thought that there are factors which play a much greater role, such as genetics.”

Meanwhile, smokers’ groups insisted the research should not be used to push through tougher anti-smoking rules.

Neil Rafferty, spokesman for the smokers’ lobby group the Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco, said: “We are not suggesting the smoking is anything other than bad for you. People enjoy it, but they know that it’s not good for them and they take the choice. No doubt the anti-smoking lobby will want to use this to erode our freedoms still further. At the end of the day, we are adults. Let us get on with our lives.”

Source: Murdo MacLeod, News.scotsman.com

Toenail clippings can provide evidence of tobacco exposure and help explain the risk of heart disease, at least in women, according to a unique study from the University of California-San Diego and Harvard University.

The medical researchers examined levels of nicotine in toenails of 905 women who were diagnosed with coronary heart disease from 1984 through 1998.

The women were among the 62,641 participants in the Nurse’s Health Study. Those with heart disease were randomly matched to two other participants by age and by the date that their toenails were collected.

The 20 percent of women who had the highest nicotine levels in their toenails turned out to have more than triple the risk of being diagnosed with heart disease as those whose levels put them in the lowest 20 percent. The risk remained significantly higher after the researchers took smoking into account, adjusting for the number of cigarettes smoked as well as exposure to second hand smoke.

“Using toenail nicotine is a novel way to objectively measure exposure to tobacco smoke, and ultimately, to increase our understanding of tobacco-related illness, said Wael Al-Delaimy, of UC-San Diego’s department of family and preventive medicine, lead author of the study published this month in the American Journal of Epidemiology. “This would be especially helpful in situations where smoking history is not available or is biased.”

Source: Josh Goldstein, The Philadelphia Inquirer

This company, deCODE genetics, is exploiting a most unusual data base: that of the total population of Iceland where excellent records have been kept since Norwegian and Celtic (Scottish and Irish) settlers arrived there about ten centuries ago. Today there are only slightly more than 300 000 Icelanders, of whom 94 percent are descended from the original settlers. For gene searchers this is, apparently, like a gift from heaven.

It is akin to having a vast private laboratory, enabling research on thousands of volunteers uniquely related in a manner which renders the search for genetic clues to future health problems. For example, more than 50 000 Icelanders, that is one-sixth of the population, participated in research into the disposition to smoking and, for smokers, the inherent risks of contracting diseases linked to nicotine.

Now deCODE is coming up with suggestions that, through the study of human genetic makeup, or our DNA, it can be predicted with accuracy that one will be predisposed to a particular kind of illness or even, as in the case of cigarette smoking, particular types of addiction.

The company’s scientists have established “a clear link between a single-letter variant of the human genome (SNP) and susceptibility to nicotine dependence.”

Such addiction can lead, for example, to lung cancer and peripheral arterial disease (PAD), a common and debilitating constriction of the arteries to the legs.

The odds of this happening to a given individual can be calculated using these genetic techniques.

The research, which also studied smokers in New Zealand, Austria, Sweden, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, revealed that there is correspondence not only between genetic makeup and the likelihood of addiction but also to the approximate number of cigarettes an addict is likely to smoke daily.

DeCODE has also isolated key genes “contributing to major public health challenges from cardiovascular disease to cancer, genes that are providing us with drug targets rooted in the basic biology of disease”.

Given the incidence in South Africa of dermatological problems such as the deadly cutaneous melanoma (CM) and basal cell carcinoma (BCC) it is interesting to learn that it is not only very fair skin, blue or green eyes, freckles, red hair and exposure to ultraviolet light (obviously prevalent in South Africa) that can expose one to CM and BCC.

Scientists at deCODE have discovered that “a novel, tightly-linked pair of single-letter variants” near a certain gene on chromosome 20 and another on chromosome 11 specifically increases our susceptibility to sunburn and hence to its dangers.

All this should be of enormous future use to the medical profession, although one suspects that our health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, would probably prefer some quackery or other for guidance rather than the research of serious Icelandic scientists.

Interestingly, the company offers a personal, on-line service for those wishing to explore their genome tree or whatever geneticists call these things. Just log on to www.decodeme.com – although I haven’t done this, so I cannot advise you what to expect.

By the way, this little cutting edge company is listed on the Nasdaq in New York and the stock quote is DCGN. This writer holds no shares.

Source: Stephen Mulholland, Dispatch Online