The Effects of Smoking on the Human Body

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The Effects

Running head : THE EFFECTS The Effects of Smoking in the Human Body

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Name of University The Effects of Smoking in the Human Body

According to the United States Department of Health and Human Services (1988 ,

. 4 , Cigarettes and other forms of tobacco are addicting Nicotine is the drug in tobacco that causes addiction . The pharmacologic and behavioral processes that determine tobacco addiction are similar to those that determine addiction to drugs such as heroin and cocaine ' In fact , even with the information policy written on every

cigarette pack that cigarette smoking may cause damage to your health ' it is not sufficient to eliminate numerous people from cigarette smoking . Tobacco products were commercially introduced as early as the seventeenth century and have become very popular ever since . The popularity of the cigarette in the contemporary society , however , to a large extent depends on the development of mass production (Goodman , 1993 . People are somehow aware of the negative effects of smoking . This is probably why numerous cigarette smokers are trying to quit the habit Unfortunately , not all smokers could successfully stop the smoking habit since it is addictive . There are scientific evidences showing that smoking is related to the human genes . This will discuss the evidences to give more light to the effects of smoking in the human body

Smoking and Changes to the Human body

Nicotine serves as weapon in the passive chemical warfare of plants against enemies that can move and chew (McGee , 1986 . Humans , however discovered that many of these toxic substances could be useful for medicinal purposes and also gave pleasure when consumed . The modern neuro-physiology has proven that nicotine is more effective when inhaled into the lungs (Goodman , 1993 . The smoke is mild enough to be inhaled deeply into the alveoli of the lungs from where it is rapidly absorbed In addition , it takes about seven seconds for nicotine to be absorbed through the lungs to reach the brain . On the other hand , it takes 14 seconds for nicotine to travel from the arm to brain after an intravenous injection . Nicotine could unlock and combine with receptors throughout the body , thus it could activate other neurotransmitters namely serotonine and dopamine . The small doses of nicotine could result to a sense of well-being while large doses may cause depression and overdoses may kill

Nicotine is highly addictive , as explained by West and Grunberg (as cited in Goodman , 1993 , tobacco smoking could get regular and compulsive and the withdrawal syndrome usually accompanies tobacco abstinence . During the 1990s , the US Surgeon General reported that smoking represents the most extensively documented cause of disease ever investigated in the history of biomedical research (as cited in Goodman , 1993 ,

. 242 . Passive smokers or second hand smokers are also affected since they also inhale the smoke

Nicotine Smoking and Genetics

There are several studies linking human genes to nicotine addiction like the the Swedish and Finnish twin registries (Kaprio , Koskenvuo Sarna , 1981 ) that support the conclusion of...