Do you still have doubts about all the bad that smoking makes people do? Maybe this video, which has gone viral in a few days, has just cleared all your doubts.
The images were recorded by an American doctor named Amanda Eller, who then posted them on Facebook. The video compares the functioning of a smoker’s lungs with those of a healthy person.
According to the Daily Mail, the diseased lung belongs to a subject who smoked a box of cigarettes daily for 20 years.
The images show concrete visual evidence of how the black lung tormented by cancer fails to inflate properly, compared to healthy, reddish lungs that inflate and deflate normally.
More difficulty breathing
According to Eller, the darkened lungs are cancerous and therefore the elastance was reduced. They will inflate, although the recoil will not be complete.
Elastance is the ability of the lungs to return to their initial state after being stretched by inhalation. A lower elastance means that the lungs are stiff and have to work harder to attract enough air, leaving the individuals without air.
A PEP valve was used to artificially inflate the diseased lungs, which slightly improved the ability to inflate.
The comparison has also gone viral on the Internet: one of the two videos has more than 43 million views, 600,000 shares and 11,000 interactions.
According to the World Health Organization, smoking takes a life every 6.5 seconds. Research suggests that people who start smoking during adolescence (as it happens in more than 70% of cases) and continue to smoke for 20 years or more will live 20 to 25 years less than those who have never tried tobacco.