If you are a smoker you probably suffer from smokers’ cough. Nearly every smoker has a fit of coughing most every morning But, do you know why this is almost universal among smokers? Knowing this could save your life.
Coughing is your body’s way of trying to expel irritants from your lungs and respiratory tract. Sometimes, when you inhale smoke you will cough. This automatic reflex is an attempt to expel irritating tobacco smoke from your lungs.
But, what we normally call smokers’ cough is something entirely different.
Every day we breathe about 20,000 times. We breathe in air, which is about 78% nitrogen, 20% oxygen, less than 1% argon, and the remainder consists of carbon dioxide and other trace gases. If this is all we breathed in, life would be great. But, we also breathe in various contaminants.
If you’ve ever been in a room with a bright ray of light coming through a window you may have seen dust particles moving through the lighted area. Dust and other particles are also in the air. When we breathe in, these particles also accompany the gases that make up the air.
Our body is designed to deal with these particulate contaminants. Some contaminants are captured by the hairs in our noses. Our respiratory tract also contains tiny hairs called cilia that help capture smaller contaminants. As you breathe, the cilia move back and forth helping to transport contaminants away from the lungs toward the mouth. Otherwise, these contaminants would accumulate in the lungs, blocking the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide and causing irritation of the delicate lung tissues.
When you purposefully smoke, you expose your respiratory track to excessive contaminants and the cilia become overwhelmed and cannot effectively transport all the contaminants away from the lungs. Most of the billions of smoke particles make their way to the lungs and coat and irritate the delegate tissues of the lungs, blocking the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide.
Those particles that are captured by the cilia are not simply dust particles. These contaminants are comprised of over 4000 compounds found in tobacco smoke. Some of these particles paralyze the cilia and some actually destroy the cilia.
After smoking a number of cigarettes during the day, the cilia are stunned and cannot effectively rid the respiratory track of all the contaminants. So, the contaminants sit there, unable to be transported away from the lungs. During the night some of the cilia are able to recover and begin their task of transporting particles away from the lungs.
When you wake up, there is an accumulation of these contaminants ready to be expelled from the respiratory tract. Coughing is the body’s way of expelling these particles. Every day a smoker’s body does it’s very best to clear the airway of contaminating particles by coughing up the accumulated phlegm and particles.
The longer a person smokes, the less capable the cilia are of removing smoke particles and the more dangerous smoking becomes.
The safest way to prevent smokers’ cough is to stop exposing your body to the 4000 dangerous compounds found in tobacco smoke. Quitting smoking can stop smokers’ cough and save your life.