While most people equate smoking deaths to cancer and lung disease, in fact many more people will die from circulatory conditions from smoking than die from cancer or other lung diseases. Also, in general, they will die at much younger ages from these problems. We would have many more lung cancers than we do if smokers could live long enough to get them. When many people with fatal heart attacks or strokes are autopsied, there are often precancerous lesions found that indicate that if these people had a few more years to live they would have eventually succumbed to these smoking induced diseases.
As for heart and other circulatory diseases, the two chemicals in cigarette that stand out as the biggest problems are nicotine and carbon monoxide. Nicotine, besides being addictive, has very powerful effects on arteries throughout the body. Nicotine is a stimulant, speeding up the heart by about 20 beats per minute with every cigarette, it raises blood pressure, is a vasoconstrictor which means it makes arteries all over the body become smaller making it harder for the heart to pump through the constricted arteries and it causes the body to release its stores of fat and cholesterol into the blood.
The heart has to work harder to overcome all of these effects. To work harder the heart, like every other muscle in the body, needs extra amounts of oxygen for the additional workload. The oxygen has to be transported through the blood. But carbon monoxide from tobacco smoke literally poisons the oxygen carrying capacity of the blood. So this results in the heart having to work harder to get more blood to itself to work harder, because it’s working harder. This is a circle. A vicious and deadly circle when it comes down to it.
