Smoking cigarettes, and cigars, has be positively linked to health conditions like cancer, COPD, coronary artery disease, and more. When you stop smoking tobacco products, you can increase the number of years that you are expected to live, and you can decrease the number of painful diseases you might develop.

Reduces your chance of hospitalization by as much as 50%

People who smoke tobacco products are twice as likely to be hospitalized as non-smokers. The hospitalizations for smokers may be due to other conditions such as diabetes, congestive heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, acute angina, and more. Within five years of quitting tobacco products, your risk of being hospitalized due to COPD will be reduced, and within fifteen years your risk of being hospitalized for diabetic complications, congestive heart failure, or angina pains will be reduced.

Women see greater benefits than men

According to the director of the Barbara Streisand Women’s Heart Center women receive more damage to their hearts from smoking than men do. This is partly due to the fact that women are smaller than men on average. C, Noel Bairey Merz MD, is the director of Preventive and Rehabilitative Cardiac Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center tells us that women have a sixty percent greater possibility of developing plaque erosion than their male peers do. Women who smoke, and are younger than 45, are seven times more likely to have a heart attack than men who smoke and are under the age of 45.

Cut Heart Attack Risk by 50%

According to a professor of cardiovascular medicine, and epidemiology, Dr. Michaels Miller, MD, of the University Of Maryland School Of Medicine when you stop smoking you reduce your chances of dying from a heart attack by as much as fifty percent in the first year.

Decrease the poisonous chemicals affecting your heart

The toxins found in cigarette smoke include benzene, formaldehyde, and arsenic. According to the American Lung Association, and David Harris MD of the University Of Cincinnati College Of Medicine these toxins damage the blood vessels and weaken the muscle of the heart.

Protects your children

Smoking parents who quit reduce the chances that their children will start to develop deadly plaque build-up in their arteries. According to a recent study in the American Heart Association Journal Circulation children who have parents who smoke have a fifty percent greater risk of having deadly plaque build-up. These statistics remained the same for children whose parents attempted to limit their exposure to the second hand smoke and the ones whose parents openly smoked in front of them.

Cuts your risk of hardened arteries

People who smoke are three times more likely to develop a condition known as hardening of the arteries. This condition is actually atherosclerosis. It causes inflammation in your body to thicken and stiffen your arteries so that the blood flow to your organs is diminished. Many people who develop this condition have to have open heart surgery to bypass the hardened arteries, so they can continue to live.