Published on
Updated
Reading 4 mins.
in collaboration with
Alice Denoize (tobacconist)
Medical validation:
March 09, 2023
Smoking, a man’s business? More really. Women are more than ever affected by the harmful effects of tobacco. How to explain such a phenomenon ? And how best to prevent this addiction? Alice Denoize, tobacco specialist and founder of Déclic Anti Clope, enlightens us.
Tobacco is now responsible for 1 in 5 deaths among women under 65. Daily smoking on the rise among women, confirmed by the 2022 figures from Public Health France, rising from 20.7% in 2019 to 23% in 2021.
Female smoking: an increasing trend
Until the beginning of the 1970s, women smoked little, smoking was mainly male. But the emancipation of women has reversed the trend: women have started smoking cigarettes en masse.
“From the 2000s, marketing campaigns were massively aimed at women. Tobacco brands dedicated to the fairer sex have appeared and colossal budgets have been put in place to seduce them“, confirms Alice Denoize, tobacco specialist.
Result: today, premature female deaths caused by smoking are constantly increasing.
“Between 2000 and 2015, while the number of deaths attributable to tobacco decreased significantly among men in France, it doubled among women, from around 8,000 (3.1% of all deaths among women ) to almost 20,000 deaths (6.9%). From now on one in 14 deaths among women is attributable to tobacco and in the age group of 35/64 years, the proportion is 1/5“, warns a report on “women’s smoking in France 2022”, led by the Alliance against tobacco, the ASH and the national committee against smoking.
If tobacco manufacturers are largely responsible for this development, this “smoking epidemic” among women would have been reinforced by the Covid crisis.
“This increase could be partly linked to a stronger impact of the COVID-19 crisis in these populations, with the use of cigarettes as a stress management tool, in particular linked to an increase in mental workload and a deterioration. working conditions for women“, estimates Public Health France.
During the Covid crisis, women more often lost their jobs and encountered difficulties in the face of this disrupted schedule, where family life and professional life are combined on a daily basis.
“The mental workload has thus been able to increase for women, in particular during confinement, with increased management of daily life and family.“, says the agency.
Many pathologies once reserved for men
If for a long time, the harmful effects of tobacco were reserved for men (lung cancer, impaired muscle functioning, phlebitis, formation of clots, stroke, etc.), women now bear the full brunt of the effects of smoking. More and more of them are suffering from diseases that were once reserved for men, in addition to developing health problems that are specific to them.
“Women are more susceptible to the harmful effects of tobacco. And since they started smoking later, the full health consequences are only now being discovered. For a long time, lung cancer was almost exclusively reserved for men, it has become the leading cause of cancer death among women in developed countries, even surpassing breast cancer.“, reveals the expert, before adding “Cardiovascular diseases, which are on the rise among smokers, are also very poorly diagnosed.
A real impact on fertility
Another health problem favored by cigarettes: infertility. In fact, in women who smoke, tobacco has a strong impact on fertility (decrease in the number of oocytes, increase in the number of abnormal oocytes, etc.) in proportion to the number of cigarettes smoked and the duration of smoking.
“This is a real subject, too often ignored. Women are often told to quit smoking during pregnancy, but in reality, you should quit long before.“, emphasizes Alice Denoize.
Lift the unconscious mechanisms to better prevent the entry of women into this addiction
Faced with the scourge of female smoking, Alice Denoize recommends above all to deconstruct received ideas.
“Often women speak of a feeling of freedom. To smoke is to be rock-roll. This is the image that the suffragettes send back while smoking. However, the cigarette has never been a tool of freedom. It is on the contrary a poison, on which one becomes dependent“, notes the expert.
“Finally, you have to ask yourself the right questions. Does the woman need time for herself? Does she need oxygen, the real one? Once the reasons that led a patient to smoke are clarified, solutions can be put in place. Acupuncture, plantar reflection… are all tools that will help the woman get better, and from the moment this is the case, she will quit smoking more easily.” concludes the expert.
According to the High Authority of Health, “support from a health professional is one of the key factors in quitting smoking“. Depending on the dependence assessed by the healthcare professional, nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) may be prescribed as first-line treatment. Other drug treatments such as varenicline and bupropion should only be prescribed as second-line treatment. La Haute health authority judges that “Alternative methods such as acupuncture, hypnotherapy or, for some, physical activity should not be discouraged if the smoker considers them useful in his approach.