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Smoking in adolescents is of particular concern, since it has been noted that those who begin smoking daily in adolescence usually smoke throughout their lives, and it has also been established that smoking increases the risk of developing chronic diseases (heart disease, cancer, emphysema).

Teen smokers are more likely to suffer from cough, airway dysfunction, sputum production, shortness of breath and other respiratory symptoms.

What are the reasons for teenage smoking? There are many reasons for teen smoking. Here are some of them: imitation of other schoolchildren and students; a sense of novelty and interest; the desire to appear grown-up and independent. For girls, initiation into smoking is often associated with coquetry, the desire for originality, and the desire to please boys.

However, through short-term and irregular smoking at first, a real habit of tobacco, of nicotine, arises imperceptibly.

Nicotine, which is a neurotropic poison, becomes habitual and, due to established reflexes, it becomes difficult to do without it. Many painful changes do not occur immediately, but with a certain “experience” of smoking (cancer of the lungs and other organs, myocardial infarction, gangrene of the legs, etc.). Schoolchildren, due to the fact that they care little about their health, cannot, due to immaturity, assess the full severity of the consequences of smoking. For a schoolchild, a period of 10-15 years (when symptoms of diseases appear) seems like something very distant, and he lives for today, being confident that he will quit smoking at any moment. However, quitting smoking is not so easy, you can ask any smoker about this.

When a teenager smokes, his memory suffers greatly. Smoking reduces the speed of learning and memory capacity, reaction time in movement slows down, muscle strength decreases, and visual acuity deteriorates under the influence of nicotine.

It has been established that the mortality rate of people who started smoking in adolescence (before 20 years of age) is significantly higher than among those who first started smoking after 25 years of age.

Frequent and systematic smoking in adolescents depletes nerve cells, causing premature fatigue and a decrease in the activating ability of the brain when solving logical-information type problems.

When a teenager smokes, a pathology of the visual cortex occurs. In a smoking teenager, colors may fade and fade due to changes in visual color perception, and the overall diversity of perception may decrease. Initially, rapid fatigue occurs when reading. Then flickering and double vision begins, and, finally, a decrease in visual acuity, since tearing, redness and swelling of the eyelids caused by tobacco smoke lead to chronic inflammation of the optic nerve. Nicotine causes changes in the retina of the eye, resulting in decreased sensitivity to light. Just like children born to mothers who smoke, young teenagers who smoke lose their sensitivity first to green, then to red and finally to blue. Recently, ophthalmologists have come up with a new name for blindness – tobacco amblyopathy, which occurs as a manifestation of subacute intoxication due to smoking abuse. The mucous membranes of the eyes of children and adolescents are especially sensitive to contamination by tobacco smoke products. Nicotine increases intraocular pressure.

Smoking among teenagers activates the activity of the thyroid gland in many people, as a result of which the pulse quickens in teenagers who smoke, the temperature rises, thirst, irritability arise, and sleep is disturbed. Due to early initiation into smoking, skin lesions occur – acne, seborrhea, which is explained by disturbances in the activity of not only the thyroid, but also other glands of the endocrine system.

Everyone knows that smoking leads to premature wear of the heart muscle. By exciting the vasomotor center and influencing the peripheral vasomotor system, nicotine increases tone and causes vasospasm. This increases the load on the heart, since it is much more difficult to push blood through the narrowed vessels. Adapting to increased load, the heart grows due to an increase in the volume of muscle fibers.

It is known that with the increase in the number of adolescents who smoke, “lung cancer has also become younger.” One of the early signs of this disease is a dry cough. The disease can manifest itself as minor pain in the lungs, while the main symptoms are fatigue, increasing weakness, and decreased performance.

Smoking disrupts the normal work and rest schedule, especially among adolescent smokers, not only due to the effect of nicotine on the central nervous system, but also due to the desire to smoke that appears during classes. In this case, the student’s attention is completely switched to the thought of tobacco. Smoking reduces the efficiency of perception and learning of educational material, reduces the accuracy of computational operations, and reduces memory capacity. Teenagers who smoke do not relax during recess like everyone else, because immediately after class they rush to the toilet and, in clouds of tobacco smoke and various types of harmful fumes, satisfy their need for nicotine. The combined effect of the toxic components of ingested tobacco smoke causes headaches, irritability, and decreased performance. As a result, the student comes to the next lesson in a non-working state.

Nicotine reduces physical strength, endurance, impairs coordination and speed of movement. Therefore, sports and smoking are incompatible. Unfortunately, due to age characteristics, adolescents do not fully understand the extent of the harmful consequences of smoking tobacco.

Prepared from materials minzdrav.gov.by