Cancer – Smoking

Transcript

So does smoking increase your chance of cancer? Well, cancer is something that happens to your regular cells when they get enough damage or mutations, as they replicate. Things that increase their damage potential in the DNA when they’re making new cells will increase your chance of cancer. Smoking is a big one. And the reason is, is it’s affecting a lot of the airway, both in your head and neck system, which increases your head and neck cancers as well as in your lungs. So this exposure kind of invites mutations to happen as they replicate, as opposed to really the absence of smoking. But in addition, smoking increases your chances of bladder cancer, of colon cancer or rectal cancer, just because it has to do so much with basically the pipe that goes in from your mouth to your bottom, as well as your lungs. So stopping smoking will decrease the chance of several cancers, just because you’re reducing the amount of damage that’s being done to cells that it involves.