Nursing student Amanda Eller has shared a terrifying video online. A Facebook video shows the difference between a healthy lung and a cancer-damaged lung in a person who smoked one pack of cigarettes a day for 20 years.
A nursing student from a university in North Carolina, recorded a video in one of the hospitals showing the lungs of two people – the healthy one and the one who regularly smokes a cigarette. Students show what they look like when trying to fill them with air.
Both films are impressive. So it’s no surprise that they have already been shared more than half a million times. The author herself added a suggestive comment: ‘The lungs of a man with cancer who smoked one packet of cigarettes for 20 years, versus the lungs of a healthy man. Do you still want to smoke? »
Darker lungs belong to a regular smoker. Next to the completely different – correctly – behaving red lungs of a person who did not smoke during his lifetime.
The effects of smoking are not immediate and often show up after many years. For this reason, many smokers underestimate the dangers of this addiction. Unfortunately, lung cancer is one of the most common types of cancer in our country, affecting around 22 people a year.
According to the Newsweek report, men constitute the largest group of smokers in Poland as much as 31%, while the percentage of female smokers is only 18%. However, with the growing number of women addicted to nicotine, especially young women, the incidence of this type of cancer is also increasing among them.
Lung cancer is called a disease of civilization
Lung cancer is one of the most common and poor prognosis malignancies. It is caused, inter alia, by exposure to toxic substances, including tobacco smoke, polluted air, as well as secondhand smoke.
Smoking tobacco, i.e. not only cigarettes, but also pipes, cigars or the so-called water pipe (shisha) is the strongest risk factor for lung cancer. Less dangerous, but also dangerous, is breathing cigarette smoke, i.e. passive smoking, to which children are very often exposed. The risk of developing lung cancer increases with the duration of addiction and the amount of cigarettes (tobacco) smoked.
Early lung cancer does not usually cause any discomfort. If symptoms are present, they are often underestimated or attributed to other medical conditions experienced by smokers, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The persistence of cough or a change in its nature, coughing up bloody mucus, recurrent pneumonia in the same location require verification by means of a chest X-ray, possibly also further, extended diagnostics. Advanced lung cancer can present with shortness of breath, hoarseness, difficulty swallowing or chest pain. The first symptoms may also be caused by the so-called paranaoplastic syndromes or the presence of metastases, most often in the bones, liver and brain.
Lung cancer – can the disease be avoided?
Of course there is a chance that you can minimize the risk of lung cancer, so the first and foremost advice is to quit smoking. The more time has passed since quitting, the lower the risk of lung cancer.
The benefits of quitting the cigarette addiction are not only related to the reduced risk of lung cancer, thanks to giving up tobacco we can avoid many other diseases, for example heart and blood vessels. It is worth knowing that there is no such thing as lung cancer screening tests, although you can regularly take pictures of the chest (e.g. x-rays of the lungs), but this does not reduce the number of deaths (relative to the entire population) from cancer, but increases the number of newly diagnosed cancer.