Effect of Cigarette Smoke on Immune System

Category: Science and Engineering Article By: Saumyadip Sarkar Date Created: June 06, 2012

Harmful Effects of Cigarette Smoke: Smoking cigarettes are treated as injurious to health but you will love to know why when you look into the immunological activity that goes on into our body. According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), smoking leads to smoking leads to certain malignant diseases as well as respiratory disorders. Smoking leads to depressing the number of antibodies as well as the number of cells that continuously invading the foreign entities. But significantly it has been found that this process is reversed if the smokers give up smoking, i.e. there is an increased level of natural killer (NK) cells in the body which targets abnormal cells, specifically cancerous cells. No matter smokers are most prone to diseases than non-smokers. Smoke contains high levels of carbon monoxide which travels with the smokers blood stream and starts to invade different body organs specifically brain, heart, muscles and lungs. Lungs is the first organ which is affected, leading to its reduced functions as well as narrowing the airways with increased mucus.

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Cigarette Smoking is Harmful for Immune System

The most prone diseases which gets affected to smokers are specially pneumonia and influenza. Smoking is an important confounding cause of morbidity during an influenza epidemic. Cigarette smoking leads to an increase in the number of Alveolar Macrophages by several fold, and these cells express increased levels of lysosomal enzymes and secrete elastase.These enzymes might damage connective tissue and parenchymal cells of the lungs, which could contribute to the pahogenesis of COPD (for example, chronic brnchitis and emphysema). Health scientists in the University Of Cincinnati, Ohio examined mice for the effect of cigarette smoke to study their immune system and chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD), a serious lung disease characterized by emphysema and severe inflammation of the lung tissue. Their research showed that cigarette smoke attacks some lung tissue which was reported in the March 2009 issue of the "Journal of Clinical Investigation." Female smokers have greater propensity towards miscarriages, low-birth weight babies, adverse menstrual symptoms, osteoporosis and transmission of HIV-1 from mother to child. Environmental tobacco smoke which is also known as passive smoke adversely affect

the health of non-smokers. This leads to both respiratory diseases and certain allergic responses. There has been an increased risk of respiratory infections, bacterial meningitis, development of atopy and asthma during childhood. The most interesting among all the hazardous effects of smoke to immune system, sometimes it protect smokers from certain harmful diseases such as ulcerative colitis, sarcoidosis, endometriosis, uterine fibroids, endometrial cancer, farmers lung, pigeon breeders disease, Parkinsons disease, Sjgrens syndrome and perhaps, Alzheimers disease.