Smoking does not cause high blood pressure. Smoking will raise a person’s blood pressure temporarily, but once the chemicals from smoking are removed, blood pressure will decrease to its normal level.
Smoking damages the blood vessel wallsof arteries and speeds up the process of hardening of your arteries. So even though it doesn’t cause high blood pressure, smoking is bad for anyone, especially those with high blood pressure. If you smoke, quit. If you don’t smoke, don’t start. Once you quit, your risk of having a heart attack is reduced after the first year. So you have a lot to gain by stopping smoking.
Did you know that smoking and heart disease are related? Or that smoking increases blood pressure? A lot of people correlate cigarette smoking with breathing problems and lung cancer. But did you know that people who smoke are more likely to develop hypertension and heart disease. About 30% of all deaths from heart disease in the U.S. are directly connected to cigarette smoking. That’s because smoking is a major cause of coronary artery disease especially the yonger generation.
Smoking is one of the major risk factors for developing heart disease (cardiovascular disease). Smoking also interacts with other risk factors. If you smoke and also have high blood pressure, your risk of having coronary artery disease is greater than it would be by just adding the two risks. If you do not already have high blood pressure, you will not get it from smoking. If you do have high blood pressure, smoking speeds up the development of a dangerous form of it (malignant hypertension), and increases your risk of developing cardiovascular disease.
Imagine this your arteries are pipes that carry blood from your heart to the rest of your body. High blood pressure (also called hypertension) occurs when your blood moves through your arteries at a higher pressure than normal a bit like water in a hose pipe. Nicotine is a vaso-constrictor which means it narrows blood vessel, making it harder for blood to move through the body. In turn the heart must work harder to pump the blood.
The main causes of high blood pressure are stress and poor lifestyle stylechoces of living. Smoking and an excessive intake of intoxicants, tea, coffee, and refined foods destroy your cells. Smoking cigarettes is a very dangerous habit. One in ten smokers end up with a cancer of some sort, while others are at a very high risk of getting one of many life-threatening ailments.
Some of these ailments are as small as a cough to as intense as a myocardial infarction, or a heart attack. Smoking is one of the world’s leading causes of preventable death. Smoking is addictive, but if one quits smoking, the body can repair itself within 10 years unless cancer or emphysema is present. Most countries have instituted high taxes to deter smoking, but with little or no effect. Most smokers are aware of the potentially fatal effects of smoking but continue to smoke because they are addicted or think that it wouldn’t affect them.
The nicotine in cigarettes and the lack of oxygen to the body’s tissues causes blood vessels to thin and leads to strokes. Smoking makes the body unable to circulate blood properly, which in turn causes high blood pressure. The carbon monoxide from smoking cigarettes causes cholesterol deposits to form on the arterial walls. The combination of high blood pressure and high cholesterol can cause a stroke. Blood clots become more likely because of the nicotine.
When blood pressure is taken there are two numbers for each reading: for example, 120/80. This is because each heartbeat sends a pressure wave through the bloodstream. The higher figure systolic blood pressure is the peak of the wave, when your heart contracts. The lower figure diastolic blood pressure is the lower “dip” or trough of the wave, when your heart relaxes. Blood pressure is always recorded as the systolic number over the diastolic number; the numbers indicate pressure as measured in millimetres of mercury on the gauge (mm Hg). Anyone with a measurement above 140 systolic or 90 diastolic has high blood pressure.
Every time you smoke a cigarette your blood pressure goes up and so does the risks of having high blood pressure