April 16, 2019
Tips
Find your 5 senses and taste to life by quitting smoking!
We all know that smoking is dangerous for our health, but we know too little that smoking affects our sense of smell, taste, vision, and even our hearing! Fortunately, smoking cessation allows us to have them quickly back, let's see how.
Our senses allow us to perceive the world. Indeed, they are continuously receiving signal information from the environment through the sense organs, our eyes, our ears, our tongue, our nose and our skin. However, our senses can be severely harmed, sometimes in an irreversible way. Causes can be genetics, an accident, a disease, aging… and smoking! Fortunately, quitting cigarettes makes it possible to regain our senses pretty quickly. Which gives you one more reason, if you needed one, to say stop to tobacco.
Smell, taste and tobacco
Tobacco smoke induces an inflammatory process. As a result of this, the taste and smell receptors swell. Smoking keeps the inflammation persistent. Luckily, the alteration of these senses is temporary, and it ceases, in a few days, with the cessation of tobacco.
An article by health doctors discusses the relationship between tobacco and the sense of smell.
It highlights that smoking, actively or even passively, degrades all the properties of smell by destroying olfactory cells and thus causes a disturbance in recognition of smells.
Of course, this degradation of smell is proportional to the amount of tobacco consumed. Again, this degradation disappears quickly after quitting smoking.
Hearing and tobacco
According to an article published in the journal Sciences et vie, "Smoking increases the risk of hearing loss, mainly high frequency treble notes sounds."
This was also affirmed by a Japanese study published on March 14, 2018 in the journal Nicotine & tobacco research (Oxford University Press), although, it has good news: quitting smoking helps to restore hearing.
In the study 50,195 people participated. They were workers aged between 20 to 64 years, their audition was tested for over a long period (up to eight years).
Thus, this study correlates the smoking rate to hearing loss. The risk is increased from 1.2 to 1.6 times for smokers. It was also mentioned that the risk of hearing loss associated with smoking decreases within the five next years of quitting.
Vision and tobacco
An article published on the NCBI website analyzed the link between smoking and eyesight. This study was made ten years ago approximately, with a group of 12,500 people.
This research has shown that the more critical smoking is, the more the view is impaired. Besides, this relationship is true for many eyesight troubles, and especially in age-related afflictions such as macular degeneration, which is 3 to 4 times higher in smokers. It is also shown that quitting smoking can make the risk close to normal again.
Furthermore, it is emphasized that a person with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) of an eye, is more likely to develop an AMD on the other eye if he or she continues to smoke.
Finally, smoking decreases the chances of successful treatment of AMD by laser and other new techniques.
Conclusion
To recover the ability to enjoy life through our senses (taste, smell, hearing and vision), it is strongly suggested to quit smoking.
To achieve this, surround yourself by your loved ones and download Kwit! With each level you unlock, you will receive state information about your health, including your mood… and the senses that you will recover. Follow your nose… Do not hesitate and start living your life to the fullest! 😁
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