Smoking With Diabetes

Smoking is harmful and damaging to everyone’s health, but the nicotine in cigarettes may be even more deadly for people who have diabetes.

Researchers have discovered that nicotine raises blood sugar levels, and the more nicotine that is present, the higher the blood sugar levels are. Even nicotine patches or gum can cause harm. Using them for a short period of time is fine, but if you are addicted to nicotine and are using these products long term, it will do harm.

For researchers to test whether or not nicotine increased blood sugar level, they added glucose to samples of human red blood cells. They also added different levels of nicotine to each sample of red blood cells for either one or two days.

They then tested the hemoglobin A1C levels of each sample. Hemoglobin A1C is a measure of what percentage of red blood cells have glucose molecules attached to them. When diabetics are given this test, they strive for a level of 7 percent of less.

Researches found that just this small dose in such a short amount of time actually increased hemoglobin A1C levels to 8.8 percent. Other samples with the highest doses increased blood sugar levels to 34.5 percent.

So whether or not nicotine is the specific reason for raised blood sugar levels, everybody should stop smoking. Also people with diabetes already have a much higher risk of cardiovascular disease, smoking just adds to that.