Smoking has an adverse effect on almost every organ in your body, warns the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Whether it's causing your heart additional stress or causing your lungs to slowly deteriorate, cigarette smoke damages your body from the inside out. The only way to prevent cigarettes from harming your body is to stop smoking completely to allow it to heal.
Heart
Cigarette smoke does damage to your heart in a number of ways. Smoke increases the amount of stress on the heart and the damage to your lungs makes your body more resistant to exercise. This means you're less likely to exercise and may suffer from a weak heart. Cigarette smoke also increases the risk of high blood pressure and blood clots, which can eventually lead to heart attack and stroke, warns the American Heart Association. Smoking is one of the six risk factors for heart disease and stroke, along with conditions such as obesity, high cholesterol and diabetes.
Lungs
Every time you take a drag on a cigarette, your lungs take a severe hit. At first, it may be nothing more than slight irritation of the throat, esophagus and lungs. But after making smoking a habit, you may experience decreased lung function in the form of asthma, chronic bronchitis and other bronchial diseases. Smoking also destroys the cilia in your lungs, which are the little hairs that protect your lungs from harmful bacteria, so you may find yourself becoming sick with colds and even pneumonia more often, points out the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
Brain
Smoking is especially dangerous when started a young age. The brain is still developing, so young smokers can become addicted faster due to the number of dopamine receptors in the brain. Soon, the brain becomes altered to make smokers believe that they need cigarettes in order to function, constituting an addiction. Although some smokers may turn to cigarettes as a way to relieve stress, the Tobacco Free Kids website points out that smokers usually have higher levels of stress than non-smokers.
Reproductive System
A woman who smokes has a greater chance of dealing with infertility, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Should she continue to smoke throughout her pregnancy, she may experience greater risk for an ectopic pregnancy and miscarriage; vaginal bleeding; preterm delivery; and low birth weight, warns the March of Dimes. If you smoke while pregnant, you're damaging your unborn baby's organs and body as well as your own.
