Health: Bad for the Bone
The link between smoking and impotence has been well-known for years among health professionals–just as anyone who’d ever seen a smoker cough hard enough to expel vital organs could make the connection between cigarettes and lung cancer long before there was a Surgeon General’s warning. In fact, the smoking-impotence link has been “talked about for 20 or 30 years,” says David Mannino of the National Center for Environmental Health in Atlanta. Still, it wasn’t until Mannino’s study last year that smoking was finally proven to be an independent cause of impotence.
“Some people would argue, well, should I worry about something that only affects three percent of men? Well, yeah, but if you were one of those men you’d be very concerned about it. I go with the estimate that [impotence] affects about 10 million men. And even that’s a soft estimate,” he says, with no pun realized, much less intended.
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McKinlay’s study yielded somewhat, er, harder numbers than Mannino’s estimates. “These are the first population estimates [of impotence] actually available in the world,” McKinlay says proudly. His work is based on a 1987-’89 study of 1,709 men randomly chosen from the greater Boston area. For his own analysis, McKinlay excluded men without sexual partners. He writes that their exclusion should, if anything, skew the prevalence of impotency downward “since men without partners are likely to have a greater than normal rate of impotence.”
Tobacco smoke affects this process in many ways. First, there’s that favorable psychological frame of mind. Smokers are two-to-one more likely to be depressed–no one knows why–and depression is linked to impotence. Next, nicotine, a pharmacologic agent, may actually block the neurotransmitters’ efforts to communicate with the blood vessels, impeding the increase in incoming blood to the penis and the decrease in outgoing blood. And then there’s the blood vessels themselves. On the arterial incoming side, smokers are more likely to develop atherosclerosis, or hardening of the blood vessels. Cigarette smoke contains 4,000 different substances, says Mannino, many of which are toxins. It is these toxins that build up inside a smoker’s blood vessels. If blood vessels in the groin are affected, blood flow to the penis is reduced.
“I don’t smoke,” grinned recent graduate Cassidy Bowman, briefly attempting to hide his smoldering cigarette.
