Cardiovascular heart disease
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) includes all the diseases of the heart and circulation. Discover how these diseases are linked, and the risk factors.
Smoking is very harmful to your heart. It seriously increases your risk of developing heart and circulatory diseases.
To keep your heart healthy, you can make small lifestyle changes to help you quit smoking.
The chemicals in cigarettes make the walls of your arteries sticky. This causes fatty material to stick to the walls. The fatty material can begin to clog your arteries and reduce the space for blood to flow properly.
Smoking can also affect your heart and blood vessels by:
You might notice benefits sooner than you think:
Quitting smoking also has other benefits like:
It’s never too late to benefit from stopping smoking. On average, smokers who quit in their 30s will add 10 years to their life. Even quitting at 60 will add 3 years. Being a non-smoker can also improve your chances of being more physically active and healthier as you get older.
Cigarettes contain many toxic chemicals that harm your body even after you’ve finished your cigarette. Some of the harmful chemicals used in cigarettes are:
Carbon monoxide is a poisonous gas. It prevents your blood from carrying oxygen around your body properly. This forces your heart to work harder than it should. It also stops your lungs working as well as they should.
Tar stains smokers’ teeth and fingers a yellow-brown colour. It is very harmful to your health, it can cause:
Nicotine is the addictive chemical found in regular cigarettes, most e-cigarettes and shisha. It increases your heart rate and blood pressure. Untreated high blood pressure can increase the risk of:
No smoking alternatives are risk-free but some are less harmful than cigarettes.
E-cigarettes, or vapes, are less harmful than regular cigarettes and they can be used to help you quit smoking. An e-cigarette is a device that you breath in vapour (steam) from rather than smoke.
The vapour contains nicotine, the addictive chemical used in cigarettes. E-cigarettes don’t burn tobacco and they don’t produce tar or carbon monoxide.
E-cigarettes can help you quit smoking by managing your cravings for nicotine. But because they use nicotine, e-cigarettes can be addictive. You should only use your e-cigarette when you really need it. If you have used e-cigarettes to successfully quit smoking normal cigarettes, you should consider quitting these as well.
E-cigarettes should not be used by non-smokers or young people.
Shisha is not safer than smoking cigarettes. A specially prepared tobacco is heated to produce smoke. The smoke bubbles through a bowl of water and into a long hose-like pipe to be breathed in.
Despite what some believe, shisha isn’t an alternative to cigarettes. Like cigarettes, shisha tobacco can contain:
Even if you use tobacco-free shisha, the smoke still produces harmful levels of toxins. This can be either just as bad for you or even more harmful than smoke from tobacco-based shisha.
In a shisha session (which usually lasts 20-80 minutes), a shisha smoker can inhale the same amount of smoke as a cigarette smoker consuming over 100 cigarettes.
Smokeless tobacco is not safer than smoking cigarettes. It’s a type of tobacco that can either be chewed, sucked, or inhaled without producing smoke.
Most smokeless tobaccos have the same amount of nicotine as cigarettes. They can also have more than 25 chemicals that are known to cause cancer. Using smokeless tobacco can also increase your risk of having:
You might see smokeless tobacco being called snuff, snus or spit tobacco.
Smoking ‘low tar’ cigarettes is not safer than smoking regular cigarettes. Some cigarette packages describe the product as ‘low tar’, but this is misleading. Most ‘low tar’ cigarettes have the same amount of harmful chemicals as regular cigarettes.
‘Low tar’ cigarettes are often found in countries where the process of making cigarettes is less regulated than in the UK.
Around half of all long-term smokers die early from smoking-related conditions, like heart and circulatory diseases. Even if you’ve smoked for years, it’s never too late to stop. If you quit today, you might feel more energised to play with your children or grandchildren in just a couple of weeks.
Yes, second-hand smoke is harmful. Second-hand smoke (also known as passive smoke) is when you breathe in the smoke in the air from someone else’s cigarette and the smoke they breathe out.
When the people around you breathe in your cigarette smoke, it increases their risk of developing:
Second-hand smoke is very dangerous and can increase the risk of lung cancer by up to 30%.
Children who live in a home with smokers can have double the risk of getting illnesses like:
You can help to protect your loved ones, friends and colleagues from the dangers of second-hand smoke by quitting.
If you quit smoking, you will greatly improve your health and the health of everyone around you. Beating a smoking habit is a challenge for many and it’s totally normal to have cravings while trying to quit. It may feel hard to resist the temptation to smoke sometimes. But you can make small changes to make it easier to stick to it:
You are not alone. Aside from your family and friends, you can get support from healthcare professionals, stop smoking programmes and nicotine replacement therapy. Nicotine replacement therapies are designed to help you quit smoking, but they should only be used to quit for good.
Smoking cessation programs offer many useful resources and are often more effective than doing it on your own.
You can make an appointment with your GP, pharmacy or practice nurse. They will be able to help you find a way to stop smoking that works for you.
You're more likely to quit if you have support:
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Page last updated: August 2023
Next update due: August 2026