How Does Smoking Affect Your Throat?

Video Transcript

"My name is Christine Marquette, and I'm a registered dietitian with the Austin Regional Clinic, and I'm going to talk to you about how smoking affects your throat. Smoking affects your throat in two ways. The heat from the actual smoke, as well as the tar. As both enter your throat, they cause inflammation and irritation. The heat in particular, is what starts to cause the swelling and the irritation. The tar actually is carcinogenic, meaning that it can cause cancer, so there's little particles that you're actually inhaling, that adhere to the tissues in your throat. Ultimately, these can cause various nodules or polyps, and when that tar gets into those particular inflamed nodules, that's when you can develop polyps that are cancerous. The other thing that can happen, is it can actually form polyps on your vocal cords, so that's a lot of the reason why, when you hear somebody who is a heavy smoker, their voice tends to be a lot harsher, or a lot deeper. It tends to be a bit scratchier, than perhaps their voice was before they smoked, so that's one of the reasons, because there's actually these little growths, or these little polyps, that are attaching to their vocal cords. Sometimes surgery can be done to remove these polyps, but it isn't always successful. Sometimes people actually lose the use of their vocal cords. That's what will happen when you see someone who has that little hole in their trachea, because they actually have had so many problems with nodules, and they had to have them removed, at this point. That is a way that they actually have to breathe, and in order for them to talk, they do have to cover that opening up, otherwise, they can't speak, or they have to use a little machine, that actually allows them to speak with a mechanical voice, so smoking can really interfere with your throat. It can cause cancer. It can cause you to lose your voice completely, forming those nodules, so remember, smoking is very bad for your throat. It can also cause something called leukoplakia, that's actually prior to full blown cancer. It's white patches that can form on your throat, so smoking affects your throat in a number of ways, nodules, pre-cancer cells, and full blown cancer."