Lungs heal damage from smoking
bbc.com
bbc.com
Worst of all might be the fact that my bank account will never be what it could gave been if only I didn't start, get addicted then squander the thousands of dollars a year on something that was killing me for over two decades.
Aint life funny that way? Nope, nothing funny about it, just regret, remorse and sadness.
If you don't smoke, please don't start it truly is self imposed misery.
I was taught this growing up, but I don't really believe it anymore. Nobody is addicted to drugs or alcohol or cigarettes just from one use. The people who become addicted are the ones who are using it to escape their lives, and continue to use the drug for the same reason they used it in the first place. After a while of this continued use, then they might become addicted. But the significant factor is their environment and mental state, not that they decided to try something once.
They started smoking when working at the mines, on boats, or when they worked hospitality, or when they hang out with a certain friendship group. Saying yes that first time, allows it to begin and develop. Because you're often in that context due to work/life you will come up against that decision point again and again, quickly becoming addicted through repetition. But what keeps you there for life is the craving for nicotine.
So abstinence is a worthwhile goal still, and especially if the opportunity to smoke comes up at somewhere you'll be regularly.
When you leave that context, all you've got left is a costly habit that's a pain to quit.
But, not saying yes at that point might have cost you some chances to socialize and create some bonds with other smokers.
And you can still find places where being a smoker will help you socialize. Ex: in places where smoking is banned in bars, going out for a smoke is a pretty good way to start up a conversation with a perfect stranger.
Some coworkers at my old work quit smoking and also had to give up coffee. The connection was so strong they couldn't have one without the other. And the socializing out back in the smoking area was also a big part of it.
It also can cause friction at work. I've worked with smokers who are practically bouncing with energy. But they were crabby and combative when their nicotine levels were low. Then ten minutes later back to bouncy and cheery, it was exhausting to be around. I also estimated the 10 or 15 minute smoke breaks meant that my coworker made $5/hour more than me when were actually paid the same rate. He was adamant they were not breaks it was just a "quick smoke" but he was gone for 10 or 15 minutes every hour.
That doesn't sound right; the pattern I've generally seen for pack(s)-a-day people is they take similar smoke breaks as pack-a-week people -- something like once every few hours. But they'll smoke multiple cigarettes in that break. This would also make sense if you imagine nicotine decrease rate as constant, but number of cigarettes required to hit "satisfied" as steadily-increasing, though I don't know if that's the case.
Additionally, IME, smoking or not, I've noticed that most people follow the pattern of
1. Do a decent chunk of work for a few hours 2. Dick around for 20 minutes, especially if they just finished something notable
where that 20 minutes get spent on coffee breaks, smoke breaks, chatting around, etc.
Most of the "hard workers" spend more total hours, not more continuous hours, as far as I've seen. Of course, intentional abuse of the break is another matter, but that's independent of smoking
By comparison 3 heavily medicated days in the hospital plus 1 week on heavy Opiods and 2 weeks light Opiods and that’s a vastly lesser craving. So, no addiction is not really just about long term exposure.
PS: Addiction is also not simply a habit, though habits make addiction harder to deal with.
Nicotine can be just as harmless as caffeine. Personally I don't find nicotine very addictive at all, but even if it were super addictive it's all about how you consume it. [1] Nobody cares about how many people are addicted to caffeine, because the main consumption method of caffeine is pretty safe (coffee).
Caffeine is actually mixed with meth in ya ba (popular in Thailand) [2], but that doesn't mean that caffeine ruins lives. When you say that nicotine is deadly you're conflating the drug with something completely separate. It's sort of like saying that air is deadly, because it could kill you if you inject a lot of it into your veins.
At this point I'm just happy I can breathe properly.
I can smoke a cigarette or cigar socially, periodically, have done so for years, and never experience a craving. However, alcohol calls to me like Odysseus's sirens.
I have friends who are precisely the opposite: hopelessly jonesing for cigarettes, but have no problem grabbing a few beers a month with friends.
This is not merely anecdata - individual susceptibility has been documented in the literature, as well.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171010124112.h...
my friend is trying to quit and i hope he does , his health is sub-par.
In that context, certain things that may seem benign to try can easily progress into a stronger habit, then a dependency and pave the way to a real addiction.
This sort of drug education is actively harmful for exactly the reason that you mention: For most people it does not work that way and when people encounter things that they thought are true and that turned out to be lies, trust in whatever else you told them is going to evaporate.
The kicker with lung cancer is that it doesn't really have any symptoms, and most people don't know they've got it until the cancer has metastasized and shows up somewhere else. That's more-or-less a death sentence.
Please do yourself a favor and get tested every ~6 months. (I know there are a lot of people that say false positives do more harm than good, and I still believe you're better to get tested if you smoked a pack a day for >10 years)
I am by no means a lung cancer expert, but currently there is contention about whether lung cancer screening in smokers is worthwhile, and I doubt at 6 monthly intervals. Some studies have shown benefits from screening for smokers, but I dont think any high quality evidence exist which shows a clear benefit of screening. There are options for screening, chest xray, CT chest. A CT chest is more sensitive than a chest xray but doing it every 6 months is going to cause much more harm than good.
My more general point is that these are recommendations which need to be evidence based, and doing more harm than good through false positives, excess radiation exposure, etc is a real risk. I dont think its helpful to make suggestions that are not based on evidence.
a) it was published yesterday, which means there is insufficient time to have a good critical appraisal.
b) looking at the confidence intervals, although there is significance in men, there is not one in men, and the confidence interval is quite wide
c) all cause mortality is similar in both groups despite screening
d) the follow up is only 10 years after first CT. the effect of radiation from these multiple CTs is unlikely to have reached maximum effect in damage to tissues/new neoplasms. This may also explain the increased non lung cancer mortality.
e) no mention is made of morbidity (although I might have missed it) which is a huge importance.
Overall, it’s unsurprising that in a group screened regularly for lung cancer that lung cancer incidence increases but mortality drops. The problem is the other effects of screening which this paper doesn’t seem to focus on. I don’t think this actually shows screening is particularly worth it especially given it’s caveats.
> Waking a Sleeping Giant: The Tobacco Industry’s Response to the Polonium-210 Issue https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2509609/
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=japan+lung+cancer+paradox!g
What is actually going on here?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18420238
I get Fallout vibes here.
Plus that VATS bonus
It's been a long time since I've smoked. I've lost people close to me and will soon lose another due to lung cancer or emphysema. Smoking sucks, but I do miss those quite moments outside in the cool air with a cigarette.
It's a shame we have to walk past / through so many people smoking on the sidewalk though. It really is quite a disgusting habit.
If you work in a smoke-filled bar for 20 years or something, second-hand smoke is probably bad for you although the evidence for even that is much weaker than originally claimed.
Second-hand smoke outdoors in open air has very little in evidence to support claims that it's going to do much to you.
https://slate.com/technology/2017/02/secondhand-smoke-isnt-a...
1 and 2 combine for a moment of micro-anger
Whether or not second-hand smoke is carcinogenic or otherwise detrimental, the smell alone should force a public ban.
Or my solution: let businesses determine whether or not they want to allow smoking and for the most part the non-smokers will self-segregate to the non-smoking establishments just to avoid smelling like a cancerous ashtray.
I tried to switch to vaping high nic (20mg liquid) - i think i may have scarring on my wind pipe (my throat still hurts from vaping that high nic, and breathing is still sometimes painful, which is pretty bad news)
Lungs do recover, but dont count on it. Quit today, and take it seriously.
Watch thank you for smoking, its great for stopping.
One of my friends from decades ago had asthma right through his teenage years, and was extremely thin and weedy. Couldn't exercise much without coughing fits and similar.
He took up swimming (!), and although it was slow going at first he eventually developed good lung capacity. And became a body builder. :)
Suspecting the same thing would work for anyone with not much (or damaged) lung capacity.
I smoked for 23 years and was diagnosed with COPD at about year 17. I still have serious lung issues but they do get better, slowly. Also I want to say that my body has adapted to function better in lower oxygen availability environment - as long as I don't burst cardio over a level I'm not accustomed to, I can keep it up for hours esp. endurance
I don't stink like an ashtray and the smell of other smokers turns my stomach upside down and yet I am still under the spell of nicotine via ... e-cigs. Should I force myself to quit? Again, I haven't experienced any of the symptoms you describe above and smoked for a nearly the same period albeit just half a pack a day...
Nicotine alone is probably better than tobacco, but by how much, we are not sure.
Nicotine alone fucks with my hand joints -- whenever I go back to NTR my hand joints, my thumb joints hurt like hell; it takes about two- three months after I completely quit nicotine for the pain to subside.
Humans are just exceptionally good at metabolizing both.
After faffing two years with patches and liquids I took the Varenicline route... it was supposed to last 10 days and i stayed on it one full month but eventually I literally forgot to light up.
It works
Her cigarette budget was 80% of her pretty frugal food budget. If she hadn’t been smoking she wouldn’t have had to put so much time and effort into managing her food budget.
I wonder how much and how many ways our situation would have been better when I was a kid if my dad hadn’t smoked the entire time. Fucker used to hotbox us in the winter, too.
It's in the human nature, instead of fighting it it's better educate people to not abuse of anything
Playing devil's advocate, I'd say that the misery is not the smoking, but the excess smoking. Everything in excess begets misery.
I only smoked for about a year before deciding to quit. Unfortunately, I took me 12 years to finish quitting.
During that period of my physical prime (ages 18 to 26), I couldn't climb a flight of stairs or ride a bike without getting completely winded. Any sort of physical exertion would result in gasping, coughing up phlegm, and seeing stars. A pick-up game of basketball or street hockey was out of the question.
I finally kicked it at age 30, 14 years after I had started. Although it took a while, by age 35 I could physically do things my 20-year-old self could only dream of. Like riding a bike up a hill, or exerting oneself at the gym.
I'm now in my mid-40s, and while the rest of body is now deteriorating at an alarming rate, my lungs are quite literally the only part of my body I never think about. I'm physically stronger and healthier in my mid-40s than I was at age 20.
So if you smoke, quit. Your lungs will recover.
I started running when I was probably smoking 10 a day and was in the best shape of my life up to that point. If you don’t do any exercise and you smoke you’re likely to be in pretty awful shape. But you can easily smoke and be in much better shape than people who don’t exercise. The bar is very low.
How did society get on just fine when almost everybody smoked? Is this reaction an outlier?
[0] https://twistedsifter.com/2011/12/picture-of-the-day-vintage...
You wouldn't believe it watching him skate, he was a speedster. Technique overcoming the respiratory system, I suppose.
He admits smoking in intermissions between periods in this interview [0]
[0] http://oilersnation.com/2013/10/16/guy-lafleur-shares-some-s...
I told him he wasn't going to be invincible for ever, though. But like me he probably won't listen until he gets some kind of diagnosis or coughs up blood or something.
Most of them didn't live till 80 unless they had very good eating habits or some manual hobbies.
My grandparents are 92 and 93. All of their colleagues from work, all of their friends, siblings are gone. They had a healthy workout of managing garden, raising kids, collecting mushrooms in the forest, occasional walk or hike in mountains. Steady life. Not much drinking, no smoking (grandpa quit when he was still young, my father forced him). I believe daily chores and manual work helps to keep the body well. Its not about intensity but regularity.
You see all the old folks who live long, but for every one of them there are many more who died because of bad luck (decisions, genes) and bad habits.
He didn’t use the word magic. He did say that after four or five years or so my lungs would be in the same condition they would have been if I had never smoked—but only if I quit then. I’d smoked in the vicinity of a pack a day for close to ten years if I were to give it a rough average.
That said, I was very active in my youth, and worked physical jobs and played live music beside any sedentary work I’ve done. I continue to do so as well.
YMMV.
Edit: I thought I should add that I don’t want this to sound like an endorsement of the body’s ability to endure punishment.
If I could go back I wouldn’t pick up regular smoking as I did. And I wouldn’t start again. I return regularly to the feeling of relief that I’m not so bound to it anymore.
I don’t hate it, and I’d have a cigar, and maybe when I’m an old withered man I’ll pick up pipe tobacco. Who knows. For those who can manage it without getting too regular, good for you—life is short. I wouldn’t tempt myself that way again. Anyway, whisky’s a finer poison in my books—and similar cautions apply. ;)
My doctor was a real motivator, and yet never laid a guilt trip.
Ultimately, taking some time off and feeling as terrible as I needed for few days really made a difference. Not everyone can make that time. I will say that after the first week it was mainly habits and the waning cravings but the best part is that:
It gets easier and easier and easier and then you forget you ever did.
- 7 years without a stoge.
I hear statements like this repeatedly and always wondered: if given 5-10 years your lungs can really heal themselves so it's like you never smoked, does that mean you can smoke with no health consequences by stopping when you're middle aged? (before there's any real risk of contracting lung cancer)
The answer to that is clearly no.
Young people aren't immune to cancer; they're also increasing their risk of developing cancer while they smoke...
Additionally, this study only speaks of lung health. There is also lots of evidence out there showing smoking adversely affects cardiovascular health... whether you heal from those effects is another matter.
On a personal anecdote, both my grandfathers smoked their entire lives - and both had thoracic aortic aneurysms (one actually had his rupture and survived miraculously despite a 97-99% mortality rate). Anyhow, tobacco use is a risk factor for developing thoracic aneurysms - and I can't see how one's aorta would ever go completely back to normal after developing such a malformation...
Smoking increases risk of cancer in the mouth and throat, not just the lungs. Your lungs aren't the whole story.
— The risk was as follows:
5 years after quitting: 12.12 times that of a never smoker 5 to 10 years after quitting: 11.77 times 10 to 15 years after quitting: 7.81 times 15 to 25 years after quitting: 5.88 Over 25 years since quitting: 3.85 — https://www.verywellhealth.com/risk-of-lung-cancer-in-former...
* mouth, pharynx, nose / sinuses, larynx, esophagus, liver, pancreas, stomach, kidney, bowel, ovary, bladder, cervix ...
The effects are not cumulative.
It's about statistics - the longer you smoke and the more you smoke, the more likely you will be to get cancer.
Exactly, a simple metric used is the "pack year"[0] which is a way to represent overall exposure.
My mother died of lung cancer which sent me down many a rabbit hole, and I don't really understand what is surprising in the linked article. It's been known that risk of cancer decreases after one stops smoking, even if it never recedes to baseline (while asymptotically approaching it, basically). You have damaged cells which might become carcinogenic, or they might not, but those cells can also just die and be replaced by healthy cells.
The more you've smoked, though, the more damaged cells you've caused, so the more land mines you've got floating around your body.
There are many health consequences - lung health is just one
There's a "Smoker's cough" associated with people who smoke, but also a more serious "Smoker's cough" for some past smokers who are quitting. It's loud, obnoxious, and it feels like your insides are going to turn out if you cough one more time.
If you were a heavy smoker, like I once was, you can't breathe quickly or else you'll go into a coughing spell. Exercising and otherwise enjoying the world on foot is nearly impossible. There's not much you can do to make it better except wait -- Depending on your past smoking habits, sometimes years.
I do wonder if light smokers could get away with it, though.
Can’t speak on lung cancer. My mum died in 2013 from non-Hodgson’s lymphoma and she only smoked for a few years in her early twenties. She was diagnosed in her forties and it didn’t actually get her until her early seventies.
The risk there is highest in current smokers, lowest in non-smokers, and past smokers are in the middle.
Not sure its worth wagering on it.
I've been switching to vaping lately which has cut down my smoking a lot, especially when I'm drinking. I plan on switching to 100% vaping at some point and after a couple of months it's starting to happen naturally more and more. Maybe if I get that far I'll lower the nicotine levels and try quitting, but for now it's nice to smell a bit better, breath a bit better and not have a burning hole in my wallet.
I will summarize for convenience. Essentially, what we did for the experiment was to observe the effect of tobacco "juice" (i.e. the loose trimmings from a Marlboro Red cigarette which were soaked in water) on a cell culture where the cells were taken from the inside of our mouths(cheeks) via cotton swabs.
The experiment was to observe the effects of this tobacco juice on the cells over time.
Within 2 weeks of exposure, the cells mutated and were "cancerous" and appeared disfigured and damaged.
This was terrifying to see up close.
So he was probably healthier even though it was based on scare tactics.
Just a small addition/correction: Back when all fat was considered worse for you. We've since started distinguishing between trans fats, and saturated/unsaturated fats, and various subtypes of those.
Trans fats and saturated fats are still bad, despite what some types would have you believe. As is sugar.
That's a nice way to say "smoking destroys 60% of your lungs."
[1] "The overwhelming majority of cells taken from a smoker's airways had been mutated by tobacco, with cells containing up to 10,000 genetic alterations."
Up to 40% after what time frame? By the end of the study? Was the study a few months? 5 years? Does it continue to get better or just stop at 40%?
Your semantics are baiting....
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00165-7
The original journal article:
I like to say i woke up and the urge was gone, but that isn't the full truth. The days before I quit I had extreme anxiousness and couldn't sleep, thinking about how much I love life and what plans I have and how I want to have children - and how stupid it is to inhale smoke that kills you and doesn't even taste that good in exchange. I didn't want to die. Next day, halfway through the second one, I noticed they really don't taste good and decided to quit.
COPD is actually cause of more deaths [1] than lung cancer and it does NOT get better if you stop smoking. It can only be slowed down, e.g. if you stop smoking.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rat...
" The higher risk of lung cancer in ex-smokers compared with non-smokers is reflected in their high mutation burden and the signature of smoking-associated mutations in most of their lung cells (similar to the cellular profile of current smokers). Although ex-smokers have a high risk of developing lung cancer, their risk is reduced compared with that of current smokers, and this lowering depends on the length of time of smoking cessation1. Why this is the case has been hard to explain. However, perhaps the most surprising result of Yoshida and colleagues’ work might offer a clue: in 5 out of 6 ex-smokers, 20–50% of the cells had a low mutation burden that was similar to the profile of non-smokers of the same age range. "
The main cause of lung cancer is precisely that mutation burden that the paper studies. From what I read, most lung cancers stem from mutations of bronchial epithelial cells instead of mutations in the alveoles or other parts of the lung.
The mutation burden is both the cause of lung cancer and can advance the disease by further mutations leading to accelerated growth/metasthazing behaviour/etc.
If you smoke 1 pack a day for 15 years (what they call "15 pack.years"), your lungs will completely heal, and you have no more risk than the next guy to get lung cancer.
After 15 pack.years, then the risk starts to increase significantly.
It is definitely a huge problem to maintain these physiologically stressful habits into old age when body no longer has the work capacity or ability to adapt.
He passed away a couple of weeks ago at the age of 62, due to heart issues, a delayed consequence of smoking and a traditional diet heavy in saturated fat. Living clean(-ish) for 16 years doesn't completely absolve you of your unhealthy habits earlier in life.
Don't start smoking, don't let your diet get shitty and full of saturated fat and sugar. Otherwise it will suck later in life, and sometimes sooner than you think.
I breathe easier, got my appetite back and my social life improved. I can smell things. I can taste food again. I can talk to people without worrying about offensive breath.
Smoking takes away more than you may know. I'm 29 and wish I had quit much, much earlier. Lots of damaged relationships in my past. Those, unlike my lungs, have sadly not started to heal.
On a related note, I think the demonstration that lung cells and lung cancers bear the stigmata of tobacco related mutagenesis has some significance to the legal liability of Big Tobacco. With this data one can show that a particular cancer in a particular person began from a single cell which was mutated by tobacco exposure. This is one level up from saying tobacco merely increases the risk of cancer on average, which is always open to the counter-argument that some other factor could have caused the particular cancer in the particular person. Whole genome sequencing of tumour and germline DNA can be had for about $5k these days plus analysis costs, so a class action suit or even individual suits are very feasible. There will be no shortage of oncologists and genomics people happy to help out with this.
As someone who lost their grandfather to smoking/cancer, I'll take any reason for someone to quit.
It looks like magic relative to the current theory, but it’s still not exactly good
I've been thinking of making a tiny bowl-vaporizer to inhale THC in small doses just to cleanse my lungs.
https://twitter.com/Clive_Bates/status/1222799694453264385
> The Doll et al 50 year study of doctors nailed this in 2004 (see charts). Smokers avoid almost all premature mortality risk if they quit by age 40 and benefit at any age.
Smoking has a negative impact on my both physical and mental health. I have been smoking for almost 10 years, a pack a day
Could anyone who have successfully quit smoking share your stories and tips?
I think someone here at HN informed me that tobacco also has MAOI properties. Searching now turned up this link: "The results suggest that the inhibition of MAO activity by compounds present in tobacco smoke may combine with nicotine to produce the intense reinforcing properties of cigarette smoking that lead to addiction." -https://www.jneurosci.org/content/25/38/8593
You may find a MAOI helpful with getting your tobacco use under control: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_inhibitor (a reversible MAOI would be preferable)
To resolve, just leave yourself at home or at a hotel with nobody else, a decent TV serial (BBC's various history documentary series are a great go-to) or computer game and food, and admit it will take three days for cravings to subside. It helps a little if you exercise. It's actually really easy, once you've succeeded once.
The real key is then not putting yourself in high risk situations (ie. drinking) for a week or two, because any time you restart is usually because of that. That was my hardest hurdle.
It can help to sync the quit with a change of environment or heavy endurance exercise (eg. multi-day hiking/cycle-touring which helps clear your lungs). Don't try to quit while stressed out at work or on a short timeline, that's just self defeating.
The only thing that worked for me was to slowly cut back and let my brain adjust. Finally, when I was down to 1-2 cigs per day, I set a cold turkey date. I still had to white knuckle it through the first 3 weeks of zero cigarettes but the cravings eventually began to die down. For maybe the first year after that I had triggers every month or so I had to manage, but I didn't want to stumble so I just powered through them. Finally, I stopped having cravings.
I know some people say they still have cravings 20 years later but I don't. I stand outside with smoker friends and don't feel any need to join them. All the good things about not smoking have come true for me. It's so worth the up-front struggle. Please try your hardest and it WILL work!
One day I'd decided that I'd had enough, I was tired of wasting so much of my life. After undergoing that hypnosis, quitting wasn't easy, but it was super do-able for the first time ever.
Every time you think of having a cigarette, pop a piece of gum. Don’t worry about moderating your dose, you’ll reduce it over time automatically without noticing anyway.
I wish there was some way to make such a thing illegal, other children shouldn't have to grow up how I did.
Has anyone here read it? I don't smoke btw.
Don't smoke kids.
> In people who quit, up to 40% of their cells looked just like those from people who had never smoked.
Or, at least 60% of the lungs still resembled the lungs of a current smoker.
While this is the first sentence in the article:
> Your lungs have an almost "magical" ability to repair the cancerous mutations caused by smoking - but only if you stop, say scientists.
I really think BBC should have changed the title.