Smoking-Induced Chronic Kidney Disease

Everybody knows (of should know) that smoking is a habit that isn't particularly healthy. Cigarette smoke contains several poisonous chemicals of which nicotine is the best known.

Cigarette smoke contains 4,000 or more chemicals, such as nicotine, tar, phenol, acetic acid, CO, CO₂, NO, and NO₂. Nicotine is an alkaloid that has a significant effect on your blood vessels. It is a vasoconstrictor. When you smoke, nicotine causes your blood vessels to constrict, which reduces the amount of blood that can flow through them. Blood transports vital oxygen to your organs.

Plus, over time, the continual vascular constriction from smoking makes your blood vessels more narrow and stiff. The organs, body tissues, and cells throughout your entire body receive much less oxygen and nutrients than they would if you didn’t smoke. Constricted blood vessels also make your heart beat faster and your blood pressure go up.

If you smoke long enough, the people around you will start to notice that the skin on your face has become greyish and pale. The tiny veins in your outer skin (epithelium) are chronically devoid oxygenated blood and are starting to die.

But that effect not only causes your skin to slowly deteriorate. The nicotine will have the same effect inside your body. In your lungs, the smallest arteries, called arterioles, will also chronically constrict and eventually cause shortness of breath and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

Other organs, like your kidneys, are under threat too.

In a study, scientists found that current and former smokers had significantly increased odds of Chronic Kidney Disease compared with never smokers[1]. If you stop smoking, the risk of suffering from a Chronic Kidney Disease will decrease with 18%. Another study showed that smoking was associated with a higher risk of incident Chronic Kidney Disease among healthy middle-aged adults[2]. Furthermore, the risk of adverse kidney outcome was incrementally higher as smoking pack-years were higher[3].

We propose to call this Chronic Kidney Disease of non-Traditional causes (CKDnT): Smoking-Induced Chronic Kidney Disease.

[1] Kelly et al: Modifiable Lifestyle Factors for Primary Prevention of CKD: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis in Journal of the American Society of Nepnhrology – 2021. See here.
[2] Jo et al: Association of smoking with incident CKD risk in the general population: A community-based cohort study in PloS One 2020. See here.
[3] Lee et al: Smoking, Smoking Cessation, and Progression of Chronic Kidney Disease: Results From KNOW-CKD Study in Nicotine and Tobacco Research – 2021. See here.