FEATURE
A Real
DRAG
There is no doubt that smoking, and the diseases associated with it, are some of the biggest problems faced by the UK healthcare system presently. As always, pharmacists are in a prime position to provide advice to smokers, both about the dangers associated with this activity, and how to break the habit, making their patients healthier, and ultimately reducing healthcare expenditure province-wide.
tobacco has been identified as one of the leading causes of preventable deaths across the globe.
I
It’s important to note that this doesn’t just include the smoking of cigarettes, but also includes cigars, pipes and other forms of smoking tobacco.
If we focus on the UK, we can see that smoking is related to approximately 100,000 deaths per year, with a large number of these deaths being caused by conditions such as heart disease, circulatory problems, dementia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in addition to the large array of cancers which are normally associated with smoking(1)
.
It’s also important to remember that the risks of smoking are not just over the long term – these products contain vast numbers of toxic chemicals which
t isn’t groundbreaking knowledge that smoking is a dangerous habit to partake in – indeed, smoking
can exert various negative effects on the human physiology in a short space of time.
When this is considered alongside the hugely addictive nature of tobacco smoking due to nicotine content, it’s easy to understand how smoking can negatively affect a smoker’s health, and also their bank balance!
Smoke without fire? The information in the paragraph above isn’t going to be new to you, and as a result, you might think that the number of people smoking in the UK is on the decline.
In fact, the opposite is true, despite huge emphasis being placed on various programmes to both educate and assist the public in breaking their smoking habits.
Latest figures indicate that the total number of cigarette smokers in the UK is approximately 9.5 million, and these
figures don’t include the other types of tobacco mentioned previously in this article.
As with other similar activities, geography and socioeconomics play a part in smoking statistics – for example, 21.1% of the population of Scotland are smokers, 19.8% in Wales, 18.4% in England, with Northern Ireland being somewhere in the middle with 18.7% of our population regularly smoking cigarettes(2)
.
Again, as with other activities, there is a disparity between males and females of the species, with men being more likely to smoke than women.
you might assume that many of these smokers, both in the UK and Northern Ireland more specifically, will be of older age categories, due to the historical belief (and advertising to the same effect) that smoking was a healthy past time, which could
improve respiratory health and general vigour.
However, the opposite is in fact true, with most smokers appearing to lie in the age grouping of 18-35 years (according to Cancer Research UK).
Moreover, if we look more deeply at the numbers, we can also see that the total population of smokers in the UK has increased since 2010, suggesting that there is a real problem with current activities which are designed to assist patients to stop smoking.
What these figures also highlight is that delivering improved smoking cessation services is vitally important to the health of the country as a whole.
These services, be they the simple education of smokers at an early stage, or the provision of a support service which can supply smokers with the pharmacological treatments they need to break their addiction, can all >
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