Cause & Effect Relationship of Smoking & Lung Cancer

Basic Damage

The reason smoking is so hard on the lungs is simple, when you inhale smoke, you fill the air sacs of your lungs with poisonous gases. Along with leaving no room for oxygen, the inhaled gases destroy the alveoli in the lungs. Alveoli are the air sacs that transfer oxygen from the air you breathe to the blood that passes through the lungs so that it can travel through the body and feed your organs and muscles.

Cancer develops when cells mutate enough times that the natural brakes that prevent random division are destroyed. This allows cells to begin randomly dividing and multiplying out of control into a mass that destroys all the healthy cells around it. Normally, healthy cells have a natural prevention against such division. These brakes are suppressants to tumors. Smoking tobacco introduces hundreds of chemicals that have mutagens inherent in them. A list of just a few of the more powerful carcinogens in tobacco products provided by the American Cancer Institute include arsenic, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, (the chemical used to embalm corpses), and lead. Those mutagens encourage the division of cells and shut down the healthy ability to suppress cell division.

Once lung cancer begins it is one of the most difficult cancers to treat successfully. Like all cancers the sooner you catch it the better chances you have for a longer life expectancy. Treatments of lung cancer include chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation.

Continuing to smoke is an almost certain death sentence. Quitting before cancer starts provides a significant chance to cut the risks and even eliminate them altogether. Even if you are 50 and have been smoking all of your adult life, quitting now can cut your chance of getting lung cancer in half, according to the National Cancer Institute. Find a link in References.

It is possible to develop lung cancer and never have picked up a cigarette, cigar, or other tobacco product. The American Cancer Society attributes many environmental issues such as smog, pollution, and radon for the chance for otherwise healthy individuals to get lung cancer. Smoking increases the possibilities 100 fold. Living in areas with high concentrations of pollution in the air there is a chance of breathing in enough poison to cause lung cancer. When a person smokes, it is like standing in front of a half loaded gun. There might be a bullet in the chamber, and there might not, but you are taking a big chance letting someone pull the trigger.

Heredity is another aspect that affects a person's chances of developing lung cancer whether they smoke or not. However, even those who are predisposed to cancer have a lesser chance of actually getting lung cancer if they don't smoke than if they do.