Airways

Quicktakes

• Taking a drag of a cigarette floods the lungs with smoke, ash, and vaporized chemicals.
• Cigarette smoke paralyzes and destroys the tiny hairs (cilia) that move the protective mucus out of the lungs.
• Cigarette smoke damages the cells that produce the mucus resulting in less mucus and less protection for the airways.
• Smokers are 5 to 10 times more likely to contract lung cancer than nonsmokers.
• There are over 150,000 deaths due to lung cancer each year in the United States.

More...

The walls of the windpipe and airways are coated with mucus. The mucus is designed to trap unwanted contaminants from the air and remove them. Dirty mucus is itself removed from the airways by tiny hairs (cilia) located below the mucus layer. These hairs beat back and forth very quickly, up to 1,000 times per minute. This motion of the tiny hairs moves the mucus out of the lungs, protecting the lungs from the unwanted contaminants trapped within the mucus.

Taking a drag of a cigarette floods the lungs with smoke, ash, and vaporized chemicals, many of which get trapped within the mucus layers of the airways. Over time the cigarette smoke slowly paralyzes and destroys the tiny hairs that transport the protective mucus out of the lungs. These contaminants in the smoke then get trapped in the lungs where they accumulateÑturning the lung tissue black. Eventually the contaminants also change the cells that produce the mucus, causing them to produce less mucus. The result is that the lungs are left with less protection from these harmful by-products of smoking and cancer risk is greatly increased.

Links

American Lung Association

References

Napier, K. (1996). Cigarettes: What the warning label doesn't tell you. New York: American Council on Science and Health

American Lung Association