Nicotine effects on blood flow, hair, skin

[cvsvc]

I've heard and seen people saying that nicotine constricts blood flow, but I recently came across a 2000 Stanford study that found that nicotine actually increases blood flow, and promotes the creation of new blood vessels.

Can anyone confirm or refute either of these statements? I'm particularly concerned about the effects of nicotine on appearance (hair and skin/premature aging).

I've heard that there is a confirmed link between smoking and hair loss based on several studies, one being a study of several hundred Asian men, I believe. If nicotine really does what Stanford found, then what is it about smoking that creates this link?

Thank you very much to anyone who helps me with this!

 

[mychl717]

Did you hear people say nicotine does all that, or did you hear people say smoking does all that?

I don't think you can compare results of smoking against results from vaping... there are way too many other chemicals in regular cigarettes to compare to vaping, or to be able to single out nicotine as the factor for any of these results.

 

[WomanOfHeart]

Nicotine is a vasocontrictor just like caffeine. A link to the study you found would be nice, just FYI.

I would think that aging and hair loss with smokers is a combination of taking in the thousands of chemicals found in cigarettes and inhaling carbon monoxide.

 

[alldayvape]

what she said ^

 

[pineappledan]

I know nicotine is a toxin. from what the books say it does in fact have a direct affect on blood pressure and vascular circulation. but it is obviously a lot safer than analogs.

 

[cvsvc]

Thank you all for your quick replies. I realize that the thousands of chemicals, plus the CO in analogs no doubt have a negative impact on blood flow and appearance, which is why I am specifically asking if nicotine, alone, has a negative impact on blood flow.

I also realize that just because something is a vasoconstrictor, doesn't mean it necessarily has a negative impact on appearance, which makes this question even more confusing for me. Caffeine, for example, has been shown to rejuvenate skin and promote healthy hair, despite it being a vasoconstrictor.

Stanford Study -> http://med.stanford.edu/news_releases/2001/julreleases/nicotineangiogen.html

 

[Ethereal]

When I first quit smoking tobacco I went to the dentist complaining of bleeding gums while eating. Although I brush regularly it was concerning. He said that nicotine restricts blood flow which I didn't know and it's a common experience when you quit smoking as the gums are not used to the increased blood flow. My teeth are fine and haven't fallen out i'm glad to say but there you go. Maybe more blood flow to the hair roots can only help! Didn't work for Elton John either way

 

[~Milo~]

Don't stress about it,
Stress and hair loss: Are they related? - MayoClinic.com

 

[Beez]

I have not conducted a study, but my hair and nails grow ridiculously fast and I smoked 30 years. As to wrinkling, it has to do with environmental factors for certain (amount of time in the sun, etc), but also a huge dose of your genetics.

 

[Rosa]

Yes, I have heard of this study and it's an interesting one.

I'm not sure why our bodies are getting MORE blood to all the right places now that we vape instead of smoke (as witnessed by the many reports of healthier hair, gums, finger nails, skin etc) but I do have a theory that even though we are still using nicotine, we probably have increased our oxygen levels so making our bodies better process the air that we do breath. Perhaps it's not that we are getting better blood flow, but that the blood we have is more oxygen rich?

I'm not terribly worried about the negative effects of nicotine because I know that I'm getting less of it than I was getting for the last 25 years of smoking. For me, it's a win.

 

[kmac]

Nicotine is definitely a vasoconstrictor. However, it only seems to be detrimental to health overall in high doses over time or if you already have some form of chronic illness. Much like how high levels of caffeine would not be recommended to someone with heart disease. There are actually illnesses where nicotine has proven beneficial since it stimulates certain neurotransmitters in the brain.

Studies like that are often unreliable because they often subject mice and other animals to levels of nicotine that most humans would not normally take in at one time even though they say it is equivalent.

Most of the health concerns with nicotine are related to smoking tobacco. As for the differences between getting nicotine from smoking vs. vaping, nicotine is nicotine. The positive changes in skin, hair, etc after switching is most likely due to increased lung capacity and performance. I'm not a scientist, but I doubt that inhaled nicotine has any detrimental effect on the lungs cig smoke diminishes lung function over time and decreases oxygen levels.

 

[CarolT]

That "nicotine is a vasoconstrictor" crap is based on experiments where they make people lie absolutely still for hours, in a temperature-controlled room set precisely at the dividing point between where humans blood vessels would constrict and where they would dilate, so that the slightest disturbance, including even the minor stress of doing mental arithmetic, would cause vasoconstriction. In other words, it's absolutely nothing that you could notice in real life. The artificiality of their experimental conditions should tip you off to that. But thanks to constantly repeating this Big Lie, they've brainwashed people to think that something of major importance. It goes to prove how utterly dishonest they are.

 

[kmac]

Ummm... actually it's pretty common knowledge that nicotine like most stimulants act on neurotransmitters in the brain that cause vasoconstriction. Anything that stimulates those neurotransmitters will also result in constriction. This is basic biophysiology. Now whether or not this effect has any long term detrimental effects could be debated and possibly dismissed, but I work in health care outside of a lab, and I'm certainly not performing experiments but when someone is getting nicotine despite where it comes from, there blood pressure and pulse go up.

 

[kmac]

And to answer the original question, it actually makes perfect sense that smoking would promote the growth of new blood vessels. The creation of new blood vessels is the bodies defense mechanism to try and get blood to areas that are not getting enough blood or are not getting oxygen rich blood. The constriction of blood vessels with a decrease in oxygenation from reduced lung functioning would be the perfect scenario for the body to try to compensate by producing more vessels to get more blood to organs that are being "starved" of blood or oxygen. Under normal, "healthy" conditions the body has no need to produce new vessels because our bodies are designed incredibly efficiently. The growth of new vessels is a bad sign.

 

[Rosa]

The growth of new vessels is a bad sign.

OH YEAH! I totally forgot about this! Back when I used to wear contact lenses my optometrist told me that I needed to wear them less often because I was growing more blood vessels in my eyes and it was a sign that my eye tissue wasn't allowed to breath enough -- or something to that effect. (I wore them every waking hour and only slept about 4 hours a night, ok, sometimes I'd sleep in them too).

 

[CarolT]

The experiments I was referring to supposedly demonstrated that nicotine causes vasoconstriction in the capillaries of the nail bed, from which we were supposed to leap to the conclusion that smokers' hands will freeze more easily. It's bogus. The tiny slight effect they found is overwhelmed by physiological reactions to the slightest disturbance. "Anything that stimulates those neurotransmitters" includes doing mental arithmetic. And they don't consistently find higher blood pressure among smokers.

 

[kmac]

Your blood pressure won't necessarily be higher as a smoker than it would be for a nonsmoker. Everybodies bodies are different. But, if I take your blood pressure before you smoke and then take it again after you smoke it will be higher. I see it everyday

 

[CarolT]

And to answer the original question, it actually makes perfect sense that smoking would promote the growth of new blood vessels. The creation of new blood vessels is the bodies defense mechanism to try and get blood to areas that are not getting enough blood or are not getting oxygen rich blood. The constriction of blood vessels with a decrease in oxygenation from reduced lung functioning would be the perfect scenario for the body to try to compensate by producing more vessels to get more blood to organs that are being "starved" of blood or oxygen. Under normal, "healthy" conditions the body has no need to produce new vessels because our bodies are designed incredibly efficiently. The growth of new vessels is a bad sign.

Bogus. The physiological remedy for not enough oxygen is to increase the number of red blood cells, as in adaptation to high altitudes. That phony oxygen starvation scenario simply doesn't exist. And that phony scenario is based on pretending that no cause of the growth of new blood vessels exists except nicotine, which is an outright lie. Cytomegalovirus is a known cause, except to the ilk of the Surgeon General et al.

Upregulation of functionally active vascular endothelial growth factor by human cytomegalovirus -- Reinhardt et al. 86 (1): 23 -- Journal of General Virology

Human Cytomegalovirus Secretome Contains Factors That Induce Angiogenesis and Wound Healing -- Dumortier et al. 82 (13): 6524 -- The Journal of Virology

Human CMV infection of endothelial cells induces an angiogenic response through viral binding to EGF receptor and

http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/69/7/2861.long

IL-6 in human cytomegalovirus secretome promotes a... [Blood. 2011] - PubMed result

The bottom line is that's fundamentally fraudulent to blame nicotine in particular, or even smoking in general, for cardiovascular disease, because since the 1960s, the death rates from heart disease have declined just as much among smokers as among non-smokers. This decline is larger than all of their so-called "risk factors" put together can account for. They've also declined just as much among women as among men, despite the very different initial rates of smoking and of quitting.

Temporal Trends in Coronary Heart Disease Mortality and Sudden Cardiac Death From 1950 to 1999: The Framingham Heart Study -- Fox et al. 110 (5): 522 -- Circulation

This pattern of decline is consistent with the known different rates of exposure to cytomegalovirus between smokers and non-smokers, with decreasing exposure among both groups.

 

[CarolT]

duplicate post deleted

 

[CarolT]

Your blood pressure won't necessarily be higher as a smoker than it would be for a nonsmoker. Everybodies bodies are different. But, if I take your blood pressure before you smoke and then take it again after you smoke it will be higher. I see it everyday

Please describe what you do which involves taking peoples' blood pressures both before and after they smoke, every day.