LETTER: Smoking has always been associated with lung cancer. Seven out of 10 patients diagnosed with lung cancer are chronic smokers.
According to the American Cancer Society, most of them are diagnosed at the age of 65 and above. Since it mainly occurs in the elderly, younger people may not take the adverse effects of smoking seriously.
What if I tell you that even if you do not catch cancer later in life, smoking may cost you to lose your limbs faster. You may lose them to Buerger's disease before you reach the age of 45.
The exact mechanism of Buerger's disease, which is also known as thromboangiitis obliterans (TAO), remains unknown. Researchers, however, believe that it is almost exclusively linked to smoking.
Smoking possibly triggers an inflammatory response in the walls of small- to medium-sized blood vessels, which lead to swelling or clot formations, that eventually obstruct blood flow to your arms and legs.
At this point, your fingers or toes will appear pale and become cold. You will start to experience sharp and burning pain. If you do not receive any proper medical intervention immediately, your fingers or toes will become gangrenous and may fall off spontaneously.
If you are in your 20s or 30s and are thinking TAO is not relevant to you, you may want to think again. TAO had also been diagnosed in a 19-year-old Japanese student a few years back.
She started smoking at the age of 16 and was smoking 20 cigarettes per day for three years. This patient had experienced numbness and coldness of her left toe for a week and later was diagnosed with TAO after undergoing imaging scans and lab investigations.
She had undergone angiography, but the treatment did not ease her condition. After completing an anticoagulant regime, she was discharged and advised to stop smoking. However, like 57 per cent of TAO patients, she decided to continue.
Four months later, she returned with a similar complaint. This time, however, she developed an extensive vascular complication, which required her left leg to be amputated.
The question now is, can TAO be cured? Unfortunately, there is no definite cure for the disease.
Surgical and medical interventions are meant to restore a TAO sufferer's blood flow and help reduce the symptoms. The only way to keep it from getting worse is to quit smoking.
Research has shown that amputation has successfully been avoided in 94 per cent of TAO patients who quit smoking. What are you waiting for? Stop smoking now and save your limbs!
DR SYED ALHAFIZ SYED HASHIM
Medical Lecturer, Department of Pharmacology, Faculty of Medicine, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the New Straits Times