It is found that smoking habit in adolescents and teens is increasing significantly in spite of health warnings issued by Governments worldwide. Call centers culture working throughout night creating almost near day milieu from 7 PM to 6 AM and to resist natural sleep during nights, addition to packs of cigarettes has been the order of the day.
Cigarettes smoking can affect men’s sexual function according to several studies conducted globally including India. British Medical Association report endorses it. Also, a recent Australian study involving over eight thousand men discovered that smoking leads to man’s chances of having erectile dysfunction by 27%. This study also established that more the smoking, the greater their chances of being impotent. Nicotine constricts blood vessels, making it more difficult to have sustained an erection. Years of smoking can permanently damage the arteries, which makes some cases of impotence among lifelong smokers nearly impossible to correct.
Erectile dysfunction, (ED) or impotence is the inability of a man to achieve an erection or to complete intercourse. Regarding smoking and its effect on sexual function, we have done a study on 350 youth 21 to 35 years age group who are regular smokers of 20 to 30 cigarettes a day continuously for more than 10 years. This study was conducted from April 2013 to September 2014. This study was initiated in response to several young people approaching this center with a complaint of impotency. To our surprise, the results were so amazing that 32% of study subjects reported erectile dysfunction. Smoking and impotence in men have now been conclusively found to be linked.
The questionnaire included demographic information (age, marital status, highest educational attainment, personal income), alcohol use, smoking habit, number of sex partners in the past 6 months, sexual satisfaction and erection difficulty. We derived these two questions from the definition of ED, ‘the inability of attain and/or maintain an erection satisfactory factory for sexual intercourse’
We found that smoking 20 or more cigarettes daily were associated with about 50% excess risk of ED. This is constant with that in the UK British Medical Association review report which reported smokers are at least 50% more likely to suffer from ED. Anti-tobacco advertisements now feature the risk of impotence as a reason to avoid or cease tobacco use. The author has been campaigning against smoking since 1977 with a slogan “You don’t smoke the cigarette, the cigarette smokes you”
In many top cities in the world today, women smokers are increasing day by day. Millions of women in developing countries risk disease in the coming decades as the tobacco industry exploits their rising economic and political status, according to a new study, published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organisation which analyses women’s empowerment and smoking rates in 74 countries. The study shows that men are currently five times more likely to smoke than women in countries with lower measures of female empowerment, such as China, Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Uganda. In countries with relatively high female empowerment, such as Australia, Canada, Norway, Sweden and the United States of America, this gap has been closed: women smoke almost as much as men do.
