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FACTS WHICH AIM TO DISSUADE YOU FROM THE USE OF TOBACCO
So the rest of this article aims to dissuade you from the use of tobacco for the rest of your life. Consider the following facts:
• Heart attacks are the inevitable end of the road for an angina sufferer who continues to smoke.
• Smoking causes almost as many deaths from heart attacks than it does deaths from any other cause, including chronic bronchitis and lung cancer.
• People who smoke cigarettes have two or three times the risk of a fatal heart attack than nonsmokers. The more they smoke, the greater the risk.
• Men under forty-five who smoke twenty-five or more cigarettes a day have ten to fifteen times the chance of dying from a heart attack than nonsmokers.
• In developed countries like the U.S., one-third of men who smoke die before they reach sixty-five, mainly from smoking-related diseases.
• One-third of all women married to smokers are widows before they can enjoy retirement with their husbands, mainly because their husbands smoked.
• About 40 percent of all heavy smokers die before they reach sixty-five. Of the 60 percent of smokers still alive at that age, many are disabled by bronchitis, angina, heart failure, or because they have had a leg amputated.
• Of all smokers, only 10 percent reach seventy-five years of age. Most nonsmokers reach age seventy-five in good health.
• Smoking takes a terrible toll in ways other than heart attacks. In the U.S., smoking accounts for one out of every six deaths. Over 130,000 of these deaths are due to smoking-related cancers. Even passive smoking can be life threatening; it causes an estimated 3800 deaths in nonsmokers each year due to lung cancer.
• Lung cancer has replaced breast cancer as the cancer causing most deaths in women.
• Smoking during pregnancy is responsible for approximately 18 percent of all cases of low birth weight, shortened gestation, and sudden infant death syndrome.
• Other cancers more common in smokers than in nonsmokers include tumors of the tongue, throat, larynx, pancreas, kidney, bladder, and cervix. About one-third of all cancers are caused directly by smoking.
• Don’t think that because you have angina, you won’t get one of these other smoking-related diseases as well. Many smokers have multiple diseases, all caused by their love for cigarettes.
So take stock now if you have angina and you still smoke. You can’t use the false hope of so many people when they face the future “It may not happen to me”—because it has happened to you! You have already been damaged by your habit, and you can be damaged far more if you continue. Nor should you use the excuses heard by every doctor. They are listed here, with their honest answers:
• My father/grandfather/uncle smoked twenty a day and lived until he was seventy-five.
Everyone knows someone like that. But they forget all the others they knew who died long before their time. The chances are, if you continue to smoke, that you will be one of them, and not one of the very few survivors.
• People who don’t smoke also have angina.
True, there are other causes of heart attacks, but 70 percent of all people under sixty-five years old admitted to coronary care units with heart attacks are smokers, as are 91 percent of patients considered for bypass surgery.
• Moderation in all things is acceptable; I only smoke moderately.
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