14 DAY TRIAL // One third of the adults smoke and 4 million people die annually because of diseases provoked by tobacco smoking, one person every 8 seconds. By 2020, smoking will kill more humans than AIDS, tuberculosis, maternal mortality, car accidents, suicides and murder.
Smoking has been linked with over 50 issues, over 25 being life-threatening, like lung cancer, heart attack, stroke, chronic bronchitis, emphysema, and other lung diseases. But, other issues also seriously affect life quality, like impotence, sterility in both women and men, wrinkles, yellowed skin, digits and teeth, sagged breasts, bad breath, taste and smell loss, vulnerability to skin diseases, coughing, accelerated breath or increased baldness. Pregnant women put the life of their unborn children at risk by smoking, raising the risks of having a spontaneous abortion, giving birth to a still child, or the infant may die soon after birth or experience sudden death.
Now, you can add another issue, as signaled by a research recently published in JAMA: diabetes. Many researches have connected smoking to high risks for glucose abnormalities (like glucose intolerance, and impaired fasting glucose).
Now, the team led by Dr. Carole Willi, of the University of Lausanne, in Switzerland, made the largest meta-analysis to date of these 25 researches, carried on between 1992 and 2006. The studies incorporated from 630 to 709,827 subjects (a total of 1.2 million). Up to 45,844 new diabetes cases emerged during the follow-up periods, which varied from 5 to 30 years.
Smokers appeared to have a 44 % higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes than non-smokers. The risk was highly linked to the smoking degree. Heavy smokers (at least 20 cigarettes daily) had a 61 % higher risk, while less than 20 cigarettes daily were correlated to a 29 % increase of the risk. Former smokers had just a 23 % higher risk. The researchers warn that this was not a proof of direct causality.
"First, there is an appropriate temporal relationship: the cigarette smoking preceded diabetes incidence in all studies. Second, the findings are consistent with a dose-response relationship, with stronger associations for heavy smokers relative to lighter smokers and for active smokers relative to former smokers. ? Third, there is theoretical biological plausibility for causality, in that smoking may lead to insulin resistance or inadequate compensatory insulin secretion responses according to several but not all studies", wrote the authors.
"Conversely, there are also possible non-causal explanations for this association. Smoking is often associated with other unhealthy behaviors that favor weight gain and/or diabetes, such as lack of physical activity, poor fruit and vegetable intake, and high alcohol intake. There is a need for studies that include detailed measurement and adjustment for potential confounding factors such as socioeconomic status, education, and exercise with a goal of establishing whether the association with smoking is causal. We recommend that future studies focus on plausible causal mechanisms or mediating factors such as obesity, lack of physical activity, dietary habits, and stress levels", they added.