SMOKING

Hi,
This is to ask u all about smoking.
Earlier before diabetes I used to smoke m10 cig. a day minimum.
But now I smoke 1 cig. a day.
is ithis okey or i should reduce it to 1 cig. a week.

But plz don't tell me to leave it.

Regards
Sumeet

[JDRF-Team-sgg]

Although I am not a physician, I have done some research on your question and offer two web sites here which give you some facts about how smoking affects your diabetes. I fear that I must warn you that it doesn't look good for diabetic smokers. For type 1 diabetics, the most dangerous factors seem to be that smoking causes your actual glucose levels to rise, and that smoking increases damage to your blood vessels, and make it much more likely for you to develop neuropathy and/or retinopathy.

http://www.state.in.us/isdh/programs/diabetes/nosmoke.htm

http://medweb.bham.ac.uk/easdec/prevention/smoking_and_diabetes.htm

Below, I have copied some exerpts from yet another web site which makes some fairly strong associations between smoking and kidney, eye, and nerve disease in diabetics. Read on:

"Nephropathy (kidney disease) has been shown to be common in Type 1 diabetic patients who smoke and smoking increases the risk of albuminuria in both types of diabetes. (Albuminuria refers to the presence of protein