According to the study, consuming a pack of cigarettes every day for a year can cause multiple changes in cells.
A new study revealed that cigarettes smoking can cause a vast amount of damage on a person’s DNA.
The new study was exploring on how tobacco smoke can affect cells with the human body.
According to the study, published in the journal Science last week, consuming a pack of cigarettes every day for a year can cause multiple changes in cells within various parts of the human body.
The cells in the parts of the body that are directly exposed to cigarettes smoke are the ones particularly damaged. Goes with it, 150 mutations found to occur in cells of the lungs within one year, 97 in the larynx and 39 in the oral cavity.
Ludmil Alexandrov of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico said that “Tobacco smoking damaged DNA in organs directly exposed to smoke as well as speeds up a mutational cellular lock in organs that are both directly and indirectly exposed to smoke”.
Alexandrov, who led the study on how smoking of cigarettes can affect the human body, further explained that cigarettes smoking can accelerate the occurrence of the genetic mutations and increasing the risk of cancer.
“Before now, we had a large body of epidemiological evidence linking smoking with cancer but now we can actually observe and quantify the molecular changes in the DNA due to cigarettes smoking”, Alexandrov explained.
“With this study, we have found that people who smoke a pack a day develop an average of 150 extra mutations in their lungs every year, which explains why smokers have such a higher risk of developing lung cancer”, he said.
According to the study, smoking is a risk factor for at least 17 types of cancer and is estimated to kill six million people each year.
Smoking of tobacco is a mixture of chemicals, of which 60 are known to be carcinogens thought to cause cancer by aiding the occurrence of mutations within genes.
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