- Blood Clot Formation -
Smoking Facts About Atherosclerosis Disease, Venous Thrombosis and Blood Clots

Blood clot formation is an adaptive response of the body to stop you from bleeding to death.

The smoking facts reveal that one of the potentially fatal dangers of cigarette smoking is increased blood clotting causing venous thrombosis and blood clots in the lungs and the brain.

Clots are nothing more than a bunch of sticky blood cells that come together to plug a leak. They are bound together by fibers called fibrin.

It is a handy mechanism to have if your blood vessel is leaking blood!

But when blood clots form without any leaks in the blood vessel it can be dangerous. The clot can break loose and travel through the circulatory system eventually lodging somewhere and blocking the flow of blood.

This is especially dangerous when the blood supply to vital organs such as the brain or the heart is cut off when a clot becomes lodged in an artery. This causes tissue death or an "infarct".

Blood clot formation inside the blood vessels is one of the very real dangers of cigarette smoking.

Other risk factors for increased clotting include:

• being overweight
• being inactive or immobilized
• birth control pills or using other estrogen medications.

Two or more of these factors together increases your risk of blood clots exponentially.

The Smoking Facts

One of the dangers of cigarette smoking is that the coagulability of the blood is increased. In other words the blood tends to be stickier and more prone to clotting inside the body.

Another way that smoking contributes to excessive clotting is through the process of hardening of the arteries.

The damage caused to the inside of the blood vessels due to the plaque formation in the atherosclerosis disease process and the hyper-coagulability of the blood in general, means that smokers are more likely to have blood clot formation inside their blood vessels.

Creating blood clots when there is not need to have them is one of the possible harmful health effects of smoking cigarettes.

Venous Thrombosis

Venous thrombosis is the term that refers to clots that form in the deep veins of the legs. It is sometimes referred to as "deep vein thrombosis".

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