ANAT 025 Lecture Notes - Lecture 23: Moe Williams, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, Bronchiole
Document Summary
Cigarettes contain nicotine, yet this is not the real problem. The harm comes from the thousands of toxic molecules per cigarette (4,000 to 40,000) Smoke enough cigarettes and many bad things can happen. When you smoke enough cigarettes, the toxic molecules, tars, and nicotine will penetrate the mucus membrane in the respiratory membrane. You basically saturate the mucus with toxic molecules. When all the tars and nicotines get into the mucus layer, they make goblet cells very sick, and thus less mucus is produced. This decrease in mucus production makes pseudostratified ciliated columnar cells very vulnerable. By producing less mucus, you cannot move what you are producing. Your body doesn"t like all this (the tars, nicotine, and toxins get through the mucus into the loose connective tissue layer to the blood vessels out to the body) Your body will then literally replace pseudostratified cells with non- keratinized stratified squamous (creates a barrier)
