Seniors are often discouraged when they want to stop smoking.
They shouldn’t be.
Nancy started smoking in 1972, when she was about 15 years old – eight years before there were any age bans on cigarettes at all. Before she knew it, she was a full-fledged, no-less-than-two-pack-a-day smoker. She continued that habit for the next 45 years. In 2017, at the age of 60, Nancy decided it was time to stop smoking.
Her sister Jodie laughed. “At your age, you’ll never do it,” she said. “Besides, you’ve been smoking for 45 years! You’ve done so much damage, there’s no point in stopping smoking now.”
Nancy’s story is real. And it’s not atypical. Neither is her sister’s reaction. Many seniors who want to stop smoking are discouraged by well-meaning friends and relatives:
You’re too old, you’ll never be able to stop now.
Save yourself the time and effort, you’re only setting yourself up for disappointment.
The damage has been done. What, you think you can quit smoking and all of the damage you’ve done will disappear?
It sounds like a convincing argument, doesn’t it?
To counter it, let’s first take a look at just precisely what smoking does that’s so harmful – and why it’s so hard to stop.
This isn’t about the conditions and diseases that smokers are at risk for; you probably know that already (if you don’t, check out this infographic from the CDC). What we’re going to get into is the actual, physical damage that smoking causes to your body.
Let’s start with your heart.
- Smoking affects your blood. When you smoke, it makes your blood cells stick together, causing your blood to thicken and become sticky. As a result, your heart needs to work a lot harder to pump that thick, sticky blood throughout your body. Also, the thicker your blood, the greater the likelihood of blood clots.
- Smoking makes your LDL levels go up. Without going into the details of what makes cholesterol good or bad, the point is that not only does smoking increase your LDL (bad cholesterol) levels; it also lowers your HDL (good cholesterol) levels. When LDL levels are consistently higher than they should be, stuff like fatty deposits, debris and cholesterol start building up on the artery walls. As a result, the arteries become much narrower – which makes it even harder for the blood to get through.
- Stress. Even without the sticky blood and high cholesterol, smoking stresses out your heart. The carbon monoxide reduces the level of oxygen in the blood, which also stresses out the heart. Smoking raises your blood pressure, too. Which also puts stress on the heart.
Now let’s move on to the lungs.
- Smoking causes infection. One of the (many) parts of the body that smoking harms is the cilia. The cilia are basically the street sweepers of your airways. Really. They’re microscopic little hairs that line the airways and sweep out dirt and mucus and keep everything clear. Smoking causes temporary paralyzation to the cilia. Too much smoking can destroy them entirely. Either way, it leaves the smoker way open to colds and infections – including pneumonia.
- Lung inflammation. If you look at an image of the lungs, you’ll see that they’re full of what look like crevices. Those are the airways and tissues. When you smoke, those crevices become inflamed. If you’re a smoker, have you ever gotten that feeling where your chest gets all tight and you feel out of breath? Inflammation is what causes that. And continued inflammation causes scar tissue to build up. Not good.
What about the face?
- Did you know that smoking can affect your night vision? Really. The eye uses rhodopsin in order to be able to see at night, and nicotine reduces its production. It’s also been shown to directly increase the risk of cataracts and macular degeneration.
- Wrinkles, in time. Smoking causes the skin in the face to lose its elasticity, which means more wrinkles a lot earlier. It dulls your skin tone, too, making it dull and gray way before its time. In other words, if you want to look a lot older than you are, smoking does a great job of it.
- Hearing loss. Yes, smoking can cause hearing loss because it reduces the oxygen supply to the cochlea.
- Oral decay. We all know that smoking turns the teeth yellow. It also weakens them, which is why smokers tend to have a lot more cavities. Smoking also causes sores and gum disease.
So if smoking is this bad, why is it so hard to stop smoking?
The reason is that there’s one more part of the body that nicotine affects. And that’s the brain. This is going to sound melodramatic, but the medical truth is that nicotine is every bit as addictive as heroin. When a person smokes regularly, the brain develops more and more nicotine receptors to accommodate the amount that’s coming in. That’s how the addiction forms.
That means that it’s almost hopeless for older adults to stop smoking, isn’t it?
Things have been sounding pretty bleak until now. So here comes the good news: No matter how long you or your loved one have been smoking, you will reap benefits from stopping. And the benefits kick in right away.
That’s what we’ll be talking about next time.