What are the health risks of smoking tobacco?

Quitting smoking is important for your health. Besides being the leading cause of cancer in the United States, smoking tobacco harms most organs of your body and causes many other health problems.

Tobacco smoke contains many chemicals and can even be harmful even if you don't smoke. Exposure to secondhand smoke can increase the risk of cancer and other diseases. If you're pregnant, it can harm your fetus.

It can be difficult to quit smoking. That's because smoking also causes addiction to nicotine, a stimulant drug in tobacco. Nicotine addiction makes it harder to stop, but quitting smoking can improve the quality and length of your life.

What are the benefits of quitting smoking?

Tobacco use is the most common preventable cause of death. The more years you smoke and the more cigarettes you smoke each day, the higher your risk. Quitting smoking can help reduce your risk of health problems as well as improve the quality of your life.

Some initial benefits of quitting include:

• Lower heart rate and blood pressure
• Less carbon monoxide in the blood (carbon monoxide reduces the blood's ability to carry oxygen)
• Better circulation
• Less coughing and wheezing
• Sense of smell and taste return

In the long term, quitting tobacco can help you live a longer life. Your risk of getting cancer decreases with each year you stay smoke-free.

How can I quit smoking?

There are many ways to quit smoking. Common methods used to help quit smoking include:

• Counseling with a health care provider about your smoking habits, readiness to quit, and setting a quit date.
• Smoking aids such as nicotine replacement products or medicines to help reduce nicotine addiction. These may not be right for you if you are pregnant, breastfeeding, a teenager, or if you have certain medical issues or take certain medicines.
• Smoking reduction by slowly reducing the number of cigarettes per day, or stopping smoking altogether, often called "cold turkey."

You may need to try different things, but a mixture of counseling and quit-smoking medicine has been shown to be the best method.

Some people think that switching to e-cigarettes can help to quit smoking, but that has not been proven. These battery-operated smoking devices look like cigarettes but work differently. Using an e-cigarette is called vaping. Researchers still have a lot to learn about the health effects of using e-cigarettes.

When you stop or cut back on smoking, you may have short-term effects such as irritability, anxiety, moodiness, weight gain, or trouble sleeping. These are called withdrawal symptoms. You can work with your provider to help reduce these symptoms and find the best way for you to quit.

NIH: National Cancer Institute