Did you know that, during WWII & the Korean War, servicemen were provided cigarettes free courtesy of a grateful government? That one factoid shows how much our attitudes towards smoking have changed in just a few decades.

Today, smoking is recognized as the major preventable risk factor of coronary heart disease. & CHD is well known as the most serious single cause of death for both women & men. One statistic shows that coronary heart disease kills someone every 20 minutes, every day.

Those who smoke are up to three times more likely to die abruptly from CHD than are those who don’t smoke. The risk of CHD increases greatly depending on the length of exposure to cigarette smoke which means that even those who don’t smoke, but live with someone who does are at some risk as well.

Smoking does its damage because it complicates & quickens the growth of collections of cholesterol & other compounds called atherosclerotic lesions. These are located in the walls of the arteries which narrow the channel available for blood flow & also make the artery walls more brittle & easier to rupture.

As bad as all that is, smoking also heightens both blood pressure & heart rate along with lowering the amount of oxygen in the blood. The net effect is that the heart has to work that much harder to keep up with the needs of the rest of the body.

HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE
Also known as “hypertension”, high blood pressure can be a silent killer causing damage for years before any symptoms become noticeable. Because the heart muscle’s primary job is to move blood throughout the whole body, high blood pressure can severely damage your heart in three ways:

1. Heart Failure uncontrolled high blood pressure increases the strain on your heart muscle as it works to move blood around the body. Over time, this increased strain will just wear down your heart & it will fail without warning.
2. Coronary Artery Disease as the arteries through which your blood flows are restricted by CAD the effort the heart must put out to move the blood increases. As well as failing completely, your heart may also begin to beat with irregular rhythms know as arrhythmias. Both situations are very bad.
3. Enlarged Heart because high blood pressure makes the heart work that much harder to accomplish its basic tasks, the left ventricle of the heart can enlarge & lose elasticity. These changes to the structure of the heart restrict the heart’s ability to effectively move blood around as it should. This condition significantly raises the risk of heart failure