The Psychological and Physical Effects of Smoking Tobacco Cigarettes

Abstract
Tobacco smoking can potentially be a death sentence when continued over a long period of time. There are numerous devastating physical and psychological effects from smoking cigarettes. Some of the more well known effects are lung cancer, esophageal cancer, and depression. However, there are other effects not well known like the effects of second hand smoke in pregnancy and in relationship to pets. There is also a great deal of minor effects like confusion in the older population, possible development of diabetes, and could potentially put one at more risk for developing pneumonia.


The Psychological and Physical Effects of Smoking Tobacco Cigarettes


Directly following the Civil War in the United States, more time and money was devoted to the manufacturing of cigarettes (Fanny & Vera, 2009). Since then, tobacco smoking has become a widely accepted social behavior (Baldauf, 2008). In the mid 1900s, research was conducted to show the devastating psychological and physical effects of tobacco cigarette smoking. Despite this research, according to the National Institute on drug Abuse, “between 1964 and 2004, cigarette smoking caused an estimated 12 million deaths, including 4.1 million deaths from cancer, and 5.5 million deaths from cardiovascular disease” (2009). Furthermore, according to the American Heart Association, in the United States alone “an estimated 26.2 million men and 20.9 million women are smokers” (2009). In order to understand why billions of people around the world continue to smoke, even though it is common knowledge how devastating cigarette smoking is, one has to take a more in depth look at the psychological and physical effects of smoking tobacco cigarettes within and outside the United States.

A broad article on smoking entitled A Profile of Tobacco Smoking by Martin Jarvis gave a general overview of physical and psychological dependence in regards to smoking tobacco. Jarvis’ research was conducted in London and states that,
smoking is strongly linked to a variety of other life-style indicators. It is associated with alcohol consumption and with caffeine intake, and is particularly common among patients with depressive illnesses and schizophrenia (1994).

When looking at further patterns of smoking, Jarvis goes on to note that in London male smokers smoke on average 17 cigarettes per day and females 14 per day (1994); Jarvis continues in saying that most smokers admit that they would like to give the habit up. Jarvis states, in a recent survey of British adults, 58% of cigarette smokers said that they wanted to give up smoking altogether, but of those who wanted to give [it] up only 13% percent thought that if they decided to give up [smoking] during the next 2 months, they would be very likely to succeed (1994).

Jarvis also speculates that when looking at the statistics for those who cease smoking, that most of those who claimed that they would be able to stop in the next two months would in fact not be able to. This is curious because “nicotine does not lead to intoxication and euphoriant effects are almost entirely absent” (Jarvis, 1994). Yet, “patients seeking treatment for heroin, cocaine[,] and alcohol rate cigarette smoking as at least as hard to give up as their problem drug, but significantly less enjoyable” (Jarvis, 1994). Smoking causes significant levels of dependence in the smoker and turns into a compulsive habit physically, and psychologically it calms the smoker down despite that nicotine is a stimulant. Jarvis goes on to conclude that a large number of people “in the developed world” (Jarvis, 1994) continue to smoke despite “the overwhelming evidence that [tobacco smoking] constitutes the single biggest cause of premature death” (Jarvis, 1994).
Moving on from London to Canada, Salma Khaled and her associates conducted research on depression and cigarette smoking in an article entitled Cigarette Smoking, Stages of Change, and Major Depression in the Canadian Population. Since the early 1980s, associations of cigarette smoking with depressed mood and major depression have been reported among psychiatric patients, smoking cessation patients, twin samples, and general population samples” (Johnson & Breslau 2004). Khaled’s research is the first to examine the Canadian population in regards to seeing if smoking and depression are correlated. Starting in January 2002 until December 2003, Khaled and her colleagues utilized a “cross-sectional household survey conducted by Statistics Canada” and 49,249 responded (Khaled, Bulloch, Exner, Patten, 2009). The results showed that there was an “elevated prevalence of major depression […] in current smokers at 10.6%” (Khaled, Bulloch, Exner, Patten, 2009). Furthermore with those that used to smoke, it was less at 5.3%, and those that had never smoked came in at 3.9% (Khaled, Bulloch, Exner, Patten, 2009). Khaled concluded that there is definite significance in the rate of depression in those that smoke versus those that have never smoked. She also believes that more research should be done on this topic. Also, avenues to help current smokers quit smoking should take the depression component into consideration and have some type of depression support while attempting to quit (Khaled, Bulloch, Exner, Patten, 2009).

There is also a hypothesized connection between obesity and smoking. The next article Association of Smoking in Adolescence with Abdominal Obesity in Adulthood: A Follow-Up Study of 5 Birth Cohorts of Finnish Twins, Suoma Sarni and associates examine the correlation between smoking and obesity. Sarni and her colleagues used a longitudinal study with her population being “5 consecutive and complete birth cohorts of Finnish twins born in 1975 to 1979” (2009). After extensive research, Sarni and her team concluded that there is a correlation between tobacco smoking in adolescence and obesity in adulthood. It was found that “both abdominal obesity and smoking are major risk factor for metabolic dysfunction and cardiovascular disease” (Saarni, Pietilainen, Kantonen, Rissanen, Kaprio, 2009). And furthermore, “the life expectancy of obese smokers can be reduced by as much as 13 years” and that more research should be done on this topic because there is little in the field (Saarni, Pietilainen, Kantonen, Rissanen, Kaprio, 2009).

While the physical effects of tobacco smoking can be direct, which has been shown in the past few articles, there is also physical effects when a mother smokes while being pregnant. According to North Carolina’s Smoking Gain? Secondhand Smoke Exposure Influences Body Weight, Lipid Profiles in Offspring by Victoria McGovern about “780,000 U.S. women continue smoking throughout pregnancy each year despite warnings about the elevated risk of birth defects” (2009). A mouse study was conducted and provides new evidence that even exposure to second hand smoke during pregnancy could “lead to weight gain in offspring as well as changes in lipid profiles that may increase the chances of cardiovascular disease later in life” (McGovern, 2009). There was, however, a noted difference between male and female pups. Female pups were exposed to cigarette smoke a total of “4 hours a day, 5 days a week, throughout pregnancy” (McGovern, 2009) and were found to have “significant increases in HLD, LDL, and total protein” (McGovern, 2009). However, these finding were not observed when the adult female offspring were fed high-fat diets. However, “smoke-exposed male pups gained more weight and displayed altered lipid profiles compared with their sex-match unexposed counterparts when they were fed a high-fat diet but showed little evidence of an effect of smoke exposure when fed a normal diet” (McGovern, 2009). In conclusion, second hand smoke or directly smoking while pregnant can have a significant effect on the offspring of mothers that smoke during pregnancy.

Second-hand smoke hurts more than just fetuses; second hand smoke also has been shown to have devastating effects on pets. In the 2009 article, Knowledge of Risk Could Make Pet Owners Stop Smoking, Milberger states that “exposure to cigarette smoke is linked to lymphoma in cats and lung cancer in dogs” (Milberger et al, 2009) and it was hypothesized that by raising the awareness of pet owners to what they are doing to their pets may cause them to want to quit smoking. A web survey was created to investigate pet owners and of the 3,293 that responded, “that 21 percent were smokers and 27 percent lived with smokers” (Milberger et al, 2009). It was concluded that of the pet owners who responded to the survey, that “information on the dangers of pets’ exposure to smoke would motivate them to quit” (Milberger et al, 2009) in 28.4 percent of the people surveyed; it was also found that 8.7 percent of those who lived with a smoker would ask their roommate to quit, and 14.2 percent would refrain from smoking at home as not to endanger the pets in the household (Milberger et al, 2009). There are indeed physical effects that not only affect the smoker, but endanger their pets as well.

While there have been a great deal of pessimistic speculations and studies conducted to show the negative effects of tobacco smoking, it has also been found that “for smokers, nicotine has a positive effect on attention, cognition[,] and mood” (Ghatan et al., 1997) which could be a reason that depressed individuals turn to cigarette smoking to cope with day-to-day life. However, the benefits in no way compare to the devastating effects. The lethal combination of tar, nicotine, and carbon monoxide found in cigarettes eventually, if smoked for years, can lead to lung cancer, cardiovascular disease, emphysema, high blood pressure, COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder), bladder cancer, esophageal cancer, kidney cancer, pancreatic cancer, and cervical cancer (Petrie, 2005). Remember that cigarette smoking is the main cause of preventable death within the United States and Smoking “could kill more than a billion people this century, according to the World Health Organization” (Lyon, n.d.). To put it in perspective, the death toll would equal “the number who would die if the Titanic sank every 24 minutes for the next 100 years” (Lyon, n.d.).

Next, in Sexually Dimorphic Effect of an Acute Smoking Manipulation on Skin Resistance But Not on Heart-Rate During a Cognitive Verbal Task, “in a two day, two session experiment” (Furedy, Algan, Vincent, Demirgoren, Pogun, 2001) Furedy hypothesizes that there is a difference in the physical effects of smoking depending on if one is a male or female. The study began with males and females between the ages of 18 to 22 being divided into four groups: (a) male non-smokers (n=5), (b) male smokers (n=6), (c) female non-smokers (n=12), and (d) female smokers (n=8) (Furedy, Algan, Vincent, Demirgoren, Pogun, 2001). The smokers on average smoked at least 10 cigarettes per day. Then 10 hours prior to their initial testing, participants were instructed not to smoke and furthermore not to consume other stimulants like coffee or tea. The four groups were then administered a cognitive verbal test and a cognitive spatial task. In between the test/task, participants were allowed a fifteen minute break, in which smokers were permitted to smoke a cigarette and non-smokers were placed in a room to relax. It was shown that during the test/task with the 15 minute break for smoking, that the smoking period produced arousal in females and conversely produced relaxation in males. Furdey concluded that this type of research is very important “in making distinctions among psychological, introspective-psychological, and objective-psychological variables” (Furedy, Algan, Vincent, Demirgoren, Pogun, 2001). There is a distinct difference in how tobacco smoking physically effects males and females.

Currently, cigarettes “contain more than 4000 chemical compounds and at least 400 toxic substances” (Quitsmokingsupport.com, n.d.)--and while the physical effects have more clear-cut correlations when examining “the number of cigarettes smoked, whether the cigarette has a filter, and how the tobacco has been prepared” (Kennedy, n.d.), the psychological effects of cigarette smoking are more elusive and have not been studied as in-depth. Rodhe and his associates randomly selected 1,709 participants from nine high schools in Western Oregon and conducted a longitudinal study that spanned from 1987 until 1999 (2002). The study showed a great deal of results including demographics (including low parental education), familial smoking, and familial psychopathology; however, the results that were most concerning and relevant to psychological effects was the category of lifetime psychopathology. According to Rohde, those who smoke are more likely to develop “Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), Alcohol [use], Drug [use], ADHD/DIS, and the antisocial personality disorder (Rohde, Kahler, Lewinsohn, Brown, 2002). Therefore, there is a correlation to smoking and serious psychological effects.

Along with the more obvious and previously mentioned physical effects like cancer and psychological effects like depression, there are also not-as-obvious psychological and physical effects. According to research, smoking may cloud the mind, bring on diabetes, and cause increased amounts of infection.
A [...] study in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that smoking in middle age is linked to memory problems and to a slide in reasoning abilities, though these risks appeared lessened for those who'd long quit; this is important, the authors wrote, because other research has shown that people with mild cognitive impairment in midlife develop dementia at an accelerated rate (Lyon, n.d.).

Next, smoking can also increase one’s risk for Type II diabetes. The Journal of the American Medical Association “found that across 25 prior studies, current smokers have a 44 percent greater chance of developing type 2 diabetes (Lyon, n.d.). And finally the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices found “very strong data showing that the risk of infection by pneumonia-causing bacteria is substantially greater for smokers than for nonsmokers” (Lyon, n.d.).

In conclusion, there are numerous devastating physical and psychological effects to smoking tobacco cigarettes. According to Health.com, “between 1997 and 2001, smoking was responsible for $167 billion in annual health-care costs and lost productivity in the U.S. alone” (Health.com, 2009). While there are still studies being conducted and findings being disputed, one thing can be sure: tobacco smoking can be lethal. Fortunately, in recent years, the popularity of cigarette smoking has decreased. At this time, there are “more former smokers than current smokers in the United States” (Brannon & Feist, 2010); this recent decrease is due to new laws about where smoking can take place, recent ads promoting that smoking is “un-cool” to adolescents, and campaigns to show the detrimental effects of smoking (Media Release, 2003). As more information is broadcast to the general public about the physical and psychological effects of smoking, we can only hope to see a larger reduction of cigarette smoking in the near future.


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