Does smoking hurt your stomach?

Everyone knows that smoking is harmful to health, but the number of smokers in life has not decreased as a result. This is mainly because the nicotine contained in cigarettes can make people feel illusory, blindly overconfident, and easily addictive. Smoking not only affects the lungs but can also easily damage the stomach. Most long-term smokers will have shadows in their lungs when undergoing X-ray examinations, which also increases the possibility of suffering from stomach problems.

The culprit that causes and aggravates stomach problems due to smoking is nicotine, which can act on the vagus nervous system, disrupt normal gastrointestinal activity, relax the pyloric sphincter, contract the gallbladder, and make it easy for alkaline bile to reflux into the stomach, thereby damaging the gastric mucosa. It can also promote the secretion of gastric acid and inhibit the synthesis of prostaglandins, thereby reducing the secretion of gastric mucosal mucus. These can damage the gastric mucosa and cause stomach diseases.

Smoking will aggravate the symptoms of gastritis and ulcers and is not conducive to their recovery.

There are three main points:

(1) Increase the incidence of stomach diseases. According to research, the incidence of ulcers in smokers is 2 to 4 times that of non-smokers. About 40% of people who smoke more than 20 cigarettes a day may develop gastric mucosal inflammation.

(2) Reduce the cure rate of stomach diseases. Someone has made a comparison, treating patients with chronic gastritis or ulcer disease with the same medicine. The cure rate of the non-smoking group was 90%, while that of the smoking group was only 63%.

(3) It is easy to cause recurrence. Comparing the two groups of patients one year after stopping medication, the recurrence rate in the non-smoking group was 53%, while that in the smoking group was 84%.