3 Important Reasons to Consider Quitting Smoking, Once and For All

The good news is that smoking rates among adults have been falling in the United States by 73% between 1965 and 2022. That said, tens of millions of Americans still smoke or vape, which places them at risk for some very serious, and even life-threatening, health problems.

If you’re a smoker or vaper, we understand just how hard it can be to quit. While we don’t necessarily like using scare tactics to get people to consider quitting, we feel it’s important to do so here.

With that in mind, we turn to the team of skilled medical providers here at Michigan Avenue Primary Care. Here’s what they consider to be the top 3 concerns when it comes to smoking and why you should quit, once and for all.

Please note that we’re going to generically use the term smoking, but this very much includes vaping, e-cigarettes, and chewing tobacco.

1. Heart disease

We’re going to start with heart disease, which is the leading cause of death in the United States and has held this top spot for more than a century. When we talk about heart disease, we’re largely referring to heart attack, stroke, heart failure, and coronary artery disease.

One of the biggest risk factors for heart disease is smoking, which can cause significant damage to your blood vessels. In fact, one out of every five deaths related to smoking is due to heart disease.

Diving further into the numbers, smokers are 2-4 times more likely to develop heart disease than non-smokers, which includes a twofold increase in stroke risk.

So, quitting smoking is one of the first lines of defense against heart disease.

2. Certain cancers, including lung cancers

Did you know that cigarettes contain about 7,000 chemicals, and at least 69 of them can cause cancer? Of course, at the top of the list is lung cancer, and smokers are 25 times more likely to develop this disease than non-smokers.

Other cancers linked to smoking include mouth and throat, esophagus, and larynx cancers. The list also extends to cancers you might not associate with smoking, such as liver and cervical cancer. 

The bottom line is that smoking causes one out of three cancer deaths in the US, which is too large a number to ignore.

3. Type 2 diabetes

Smokers are 30% to 40% more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than non-smokers, but that’s not the end of the story. Once diabetes takes hold, it can cast a very wide net over your health, and smoking can greatly increase your risks for common diabetes complications, such as:

• Heart disease
• Kidney disease
• Peripheral neuropathy, which can lead to foot ulcers and, in severe cases, amputation
• Vision loss
• Erectile dysfunction

Staying one step ahead of diabetes is hard enough without adding smoking to the mix.

Time to quit smoking

Now that we’ve made our case for quitting smoking, we want to end with this thought: You’re not on your own. We’re here to help you quit, and we can provide you with all the tools and resources you need to put smoking into your rearview mirror, once and for all.

To set yourself on a path toward better health, we invite you to contact us at our clinic in Chicago, Illinois, in The Loop, to schedule a smoking cessation appointment today.