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Increased Risk Associated with Using Multiple Forms of Tobacco Use
by admin on: April 6th, 2011

The nicotine present in tobacco is addicting. In fact, the nicotine in a cigarette will reach the brain just a few seconds after a smoker takes a puff. The initial effects of nicotine can cause a person to feel alert and awake, while subsequent doses have a calming or relaxing feeling for the smoker. Though the effects of nicotine wear off after a few minutes, a smoker is ???encouraged??? to have another cigarette, or face withdrawal symptoms that get progressively worse over time.

In the United States, the leading cause of preventable death is tobacco use. The predominant form of tobacco use in the U.S. is cigarette smoking (results in approximately 443,000 annual deaths), although there are other tobacco products such as smokeless tobacco cigars, bidis (filterless, flavored cigarettes imported from India), and kreteks (???clove??? cigarettes). Subsets of the people who smoke cigarettes also use other forms of tobacco. Studies have indicated that these poly-tobacco users generally have higher levels of nicotine addiction. In addition to having more difficulty quitting the use of tobacco, a new government study conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that these people are at a greater risk for tobacco-related health problems including cancer, heart disease, and stroke.

Generally speaking, the efforts expended to reduce or control tobacco use have focused on cigarette smoking. In the 13 states surveyed for this study, the prevalence of cigarette smoking ranged from 14.6 percent to 26.6 percent; when factoring in the number of people using other tobacco products, the range increases by about five percent. The goal of ???Healthy People 2010??? is to reduce the number of cigarette smokers to about 12 percent (and decrease the number of people using the smokeless tobacco, also called ???spit tobacco??? to 0.4 percent). While this may seem a difficult goal to reach, spreading the news about the dangers of poly-tobacco use may help reduce the number of those who use these products.

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