Smoking is a habit that does damage to our general wellness with the effects of the addiction often showing later in life. When it comes to our teenagers smoking we may well worry about their risk of heart disease, cancers and strokes, but now there is yet another reason why they should give up smoking.
Think about bones
Teenagers may not understand the dangers of certain habits, because they do not feel the negative effects on their wellbeing there and then. But now a study from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Centre indicates that smoking could have an immediate impact on their bone mineral density (BMD). The project measured the BMD of 262 girls aged from 11 to 19 at regular intervals. They compared the scores with those who did and didn’t smoke, while also making a note of whether the participants smoked heavily or more lightly. They also looked at the rates of depressive feelings and alcohol intake as these have found to influence BMD levels in the past.
Importance of adolescence
The reason why lifestyle can have a large impact on our bones when we are young is that up to 50 per cent of our BMD is laid down at this time, so anything that disrupts this process could prove a problem when we are older. In fact, scientists from the study say that the amount of BMD built up over the two years around a girl’s first menstruation is equivalent to what is lost in her last four decades of life. During the project, the researchers found that girls who smoked heavily had less BMD at their hip and lumbar spine than those who smoked lightly or not at all.
Depressive emotions didn’t have the same impact, but those who reported more of these emotions laid down bone slower than those who didn’t experience these feelings. In the study, alcohol use did not appear to affect BMD like smoking and depression, although it has been linked with osteoporosis later in life. This shows that a healthy lifestyle isn’t just for when we are older but it’s for when we are younger too, as during this period of our life we lay down the bone mineral density that we’ll depend on as we age.
Comments are closed.