Smoking cigarettes tops the list of major risk factors of our number one killer - heart and blood vessel disease. In fact, almost one-fifth deaths from heart disease are from smoking. The long list of diseases and deaths due to smoking is frightening.
Smoking also harms thousands of nonsmokers who are exposed to cigarette smoke.
It causes infections, disease and death in infants and children. If you smoke, you have good reason to worry about its effect on your health and the health of your loved ones and others. You could become one of the more than 400,000 deaths smoking causes every year. No matter how much or how long you've smoked, when you quit, your risk of heart disease goes down. Three years after quitting, your risk of heart disease is almost the same as if you d never smoked.