| Whether you're shopping for cheap
health insurance premiums or just signing up for insurance benefits with your employer,
you will be asked if you smoke. You probably already know that, as a smoker, getting
independent insurance is difficult, not
to mention more expensive, and there's no doubt that people have warned you about the
damage you're doing to your lungs and the risks of emphysema and heart disease, but
smoking actually affects more than just your circulatory and respiratory systems.
Here are four reasons to quit smoking that probably haven't
been mentioned all that often: ·
Breast Cancer
Research published a long as
four years ago shows that being an active smoker may increase your risk for breast cancer,
especially if you already have a genetic predisposition toward the disease.
In an article published in the
January 7, 2004, issue of the Journal of the
National Cancer Institute, breast cancer risk was tracked among 116, 544 women in the
California Teachers Study who revealed their smoking habits (or lack thereof). In the
period from 1996 to 2000, two thousand of the women in the study developed breast cancer,
and it's presence was 30% higher among current smokers than among women who had never
smoked, even if they had been exposed to secondhand smoke.
Women
who began smoking before they turned twenty, who smoked twenty or more cigaretts a day, or
who had begun smoking at least five years before their first full-term pregnancies were
determined to have the greatest risk.
·
Impotence
While
women who smoke are at a greater risk of breast cancer, male smokers have a specific worry
as well, though it's not exactly life-threatening. A Chinese study of roughly 5,000 male
participants showed that men who smoke more than a pack a day had a 60% greater chance of
suffering from erectile dysfunction than men who never smoked.
Further
results from the same study showed that roughly 15% of smokers (past and present) had
already experienced some level of impotence, while only 12% of the non-smoking men
reported any problems.
·
Blindness
People
who smoke are four times more likely to lose their sight because of age-related macular
degeneration, a progressive disease that involves the loss of central vision when the part
of the retina responsible for "forward" activities like writing, reading, and
driving becomes non-functional.
Studies
into this condition have suggested that while smoking is only a factor in this disease,
quitting smoking can help reduce the risk of it occurring.
·
Alzheimer's
Disease
According
to an article in the journal Neurology,
participants in a set of standardized tests given at two-year intervals were found to have
rates of mental decline up to five times faster if they were smokers, than if they were
not, regardless of a family history of dementia or Alzheimer's disease.
It is thought
that this is related to artery damage, including clotting, and the related increased risk
of strokes, that smoking causes.
From the
risks we know, like lung cancer and heart diseases, to those we are just discovering
– like blindness and increased mental decline, to the financial benefit of getting cheap health insurance
rates, it seems clear that there are as many reasons to stop smoking as there are people
who smoke. |
