Smoking and stroke
Smoking is the single biggest cause of ill health and premature death in the UK, responsible for nearly one in five deaths. But it is never too late to stop – about five years after quitting, your risk of stroke and other smoking-related illnesses are greatly reduced. This factsheet explains how smoking increases the risk of stroke and describes the help and support available if you want to give up smoking.Around 12 million people in the UK are addicted to cigarettes, well over a third of adult men and women. Each year around 120,000 smokers die as a result of their habit. The majority of these deaths are due to lung cancer and other chest diseases such as bronchitis and emphysema, but heart disease and stroke contribute to this number.
How smoking causes strokes
As well as nicotine, the chemical that makes nicotine so addictive, tobacco smoke contains over 4,000 toxic chemicals which are deposited on the lungs or absorbed into the bloodstream. Some of these damage blood vessel walls, leading to atherosclerosis (narrowing and furring of the arteries.) This increases the chances of a clot becoming lodged in an artery in the brain. Smoking also increases the stickiness of special blood cells called platelets, which increases the risk of blood clots forming in the major arteries to the brain and heart. And smoking increases the risk of high blood pressure, which is one of the main risk factors for stroke.People who smoke are two to three times more likely to have a stroke than those who don’t. The more you smoke, the greater your risk. The danger starts quite young, in stroke terms; in men and women smokers under the age of 55, smoking seems to be a prominent risk factor.
Smoking is particularly dangerous for people who have high blood pressure. They are five times more likely to have a stroke than smokers with normal blood pressure, and 20 times than non-smokers with normal blood pressure.
Passive smoking – breathing in someone else’s smoke – may also be hazardous. Recent research suggests passive smokers were nearly twice as likely to have a stroke as those who did not live or work in a smoky atmosphere.
