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Cigarettes Research Paper

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It is well-known that people with mental illnesses are more likely to smoke than those who are healthy. This is because cigarettes tend to help those people with the symptoms of the disorders they have, such as anxiety, depression, and low energy levels. Nicotine acts as a stimulant and increases heartbeat, blood pressure, alertness, central nervous system, and decreases appetite. All these effects, that this particular stimulant has, serve as a relief aid for the individual from his illness. However, this relief is only temporary, and in fact, research shows that smoking can actually be the cause of those psychological disorders. To what extent can this claim be concluded as truth and what should tobacco companies do about it? These are the …show more content…

Moreover, nicotine stimulates brain structures that are involved in production of rewarding sensations, such as thalamus, amygdala, and nucleus accumbens. The activation of these specific neurotransmitters and brain structures aids the individual by targeting the symptoms of a mental illness, thus giving an incentive to those individuals for further consumption of nicotine. Consequently, the brain becomes addicted to this stimulant, and will depend on it for its functioning and hormone production. As a result, after a couple of hours of smoking the last cigarette, levels of the neurotransmitters that nicotine triggers start to decrease, sending a signal to the brain, stimulating a desire to smoke another one. However, smokers will never get the same rush as they got from their first cigarette, because the threshold increases with each next one smoked. After all, this is exactly why people start out first with a single cigarette a day and increase the dose to multiple packs of it, in the worst-case scenario. Furthermore, constant changes and fluctuations in the nervous system, along with abnormal levels of neurotransmitters cause mental illnesses, such as major depressive disorder or bipolar

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