After comparing and analyzing tumors researchers were able to identify just how bad smoking cigarettes damages out bodies.
A new study shows just how many mutations cigarette smoking causes to your lung cells. The findings revealed that a person who smokes a pack of cigarettes every day causes 150 mutations to his lungs in one year. If you add the number you might quit smoking immediately. This research was published in the journal Science this Thursday.
After comparing and analyzing tumors, researchers were able to identify just how bad smoking cigarettes damages out bodies. They also found that smoking doesn’t only affect the lungs. This habit can affect other parts of the body that are not exposed directly to smoke.
Previous studies showed that there is a link between cigarette smoking and 17 types of cancer but is was unclear how cigarettes can cause the tumors. Conducting this research they found that other organs are affected by smoking cigarettes and this is how people develop tumors. A previous study also showed that if people smoke, they could damage their DNA permanently.
A cigarette has 7,000 chemicals and more than 70 of them are carcinogenic. This is why smoking could lead to so many types of cancer.
“Before now, we had a large body of epidemiological evidence linking smoking with cancer, but now we can actually observe and quantify the molecular changes in the DNA due to cigarette smoking,” said the co-author of the study,” Ludmil Alexandrov.
This study showed that more than 150 mutations can be caused every year just by smoking a pack a day. In order to conduct this study, researchers analyzed 5,000 tumors and then they compared the tumors of the non-smokers to those belonging to individuals who smoke. They were able to find some molecular damage in the DNA of smokers which was not found on non-smokers.
Despite the fact that every person has a different number of mutations, smoking cigarettes can add more to their bodies. The findings showed that smokers had 23 mutations in their mouth, 39 in their pharynx, 18 in their bladder, 97 in their larynx, and 6 in every cell of their liver. These mutations had appeared after only one year.
With this study, researchers were able to prove that smoking cigarettes does a lot of damage to the DNA and it could also affect other organs apart from the lungs. They also proved that smoking accelerates the speed with which the cancer cells spread.
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