Smoking is bad for you.
It’s a simple statement that gets repeated over and over again. And yet, according to the CDC, more than 264 billion cigarettes were sold in 2015. And about the same number was sold in 2014.1 But behind the simple statement is a list of more than one hundred studies with results that prove smoking can cause irreversible damage to your body and your life.
And now, researchers at Emory University’s Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation have added another reason to this list: smoking can cause chronic pain in your neck and spine.
People known that smoking can cause heart and lung problems. And there has even been a known link between smoking and lower back pain for years now. The toxins in cigarettes cause damage to bones and soft tissue, including the spine. A study in the April 2001 Medical Hypothesis found people who smoked had a greater risk of disc degeneration and spinal instability.2
But researchers couldn’t find a link between smoking and chronic neck pain, until now. In February 2016, after studying the CT scans of 182 patients, the researchers found that smoking led to an increased rick of pain in the cervical spine.3
Your cervical spine is essential your neck, which is made up of bones called vertebrae. In between each vertebra are cervical discs that absorb shock in your spine. As you get older, these discs become dehydrated and shrink. And as they degenerate, you experience more and more pain in your neck.
The smoking gun
But what does this have to do with smoking? According to Mitchel Leavitt, MD, the lead investigator of the study, it’s the nicotine that actually causes the damage in the neck. The discs get nourishment from blood vessels on either side of it. But, when these vessels are damaged due to nicotine abuse, the discs do not get their nourishment which causes them to degenerate quicker. When the discs degenerate, you feel more pain as the vertebrae don’t have any cushion between them.
Of the patients studied, 57 percent were female and 34 percent smoked. After examining the height of the discs, the researchers took into consideration the number of cigarettes smoked over the patient’s lifetime and also other health facts such as blood pressure, cholesterol, body mass, age, and diabetes. Smokers had more cervical degenerative disc damage than their non-smoking counterparts. Even with these results, more studies need to be done on the link between chronic back and neck pain and lifestyle factors to give a whole look at the problem.
Leavitt and his research team are not the only ones to study the connection between smoking and chronic neck pain. In November 2010, a study in Addictive Behaviors looked at the link between chronic musculoskeletal pain and cigarette smoking on adolescents and adults from Canada. They found that individuals with lifetime chronic back pain were over 1.5 times more likely to smoke daily. 4
Along with causing chronic neck pain, smoking also reduces the absorption and calcium, which causes bones not to grow. Because of this, smokers have twice the chance of fracturing bones than nonsmokers.5 Although the effects of smoking on the lungs and heart and pretty well-known, not many people know the other effects that smoking has on the body. In the end, smoking causes more damage to the body and ultimately death.
1 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Economic Facts About U.S. Tobacco Production and Use. Updated April 2016. Accessed June 2016.
2 Fogelholm RR. Alho AV. Smoking and intervertebral disc degeneration. Published April 2001. Accessed June 2016.
3 Association of Academic Physiatrists (AAP). Smoking Cigarettes Causes Chronic Pain in Your Neck. Published February 2016. Accessed June 2016.
4 Zvolensky, MJ. McMillan, KA. Asmundson, GJG. Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain and Cigarette Smoking among a Representative Sample of Canadian Adolescent and Adults. . Published November 2010. Accessed June 2016.
5 Thompson D. Chronic Pain and Smoking. Updated March 2010. Accessed June 2016.