Smoking, circulation and prostate health
Men who smoke tend to hear about their lungs and their heart. The conversation rarely reaches the part of the body many of them would be most motivated by. It is a circulation problem first An erection is a plumbing event before it is anything else: blood has to arrive quickly and stay. That depends on arteries widening on demand, which depends on a healthy lining inside the vessel producing nitric oxide. Smoking damages exactly that lining. The result is the same process that narrows the arteries of the heart, happening in vessels roughly a tenth the diameter. That size difference is the reason erectile difficulty often shows up years before any cardiac symptom — the small pipes silt up first. This is worth restating plainly, because it is the part men miss: erectile difficulty in a smoker is frequently an early warning about the arteries in general , not an isolated bedroom problem. It deserves a conversation with a doctor for reasons that have nothing to do with sex. What...