What is a Smokers Cough?
Smoker’s cough isn’t a medical term, but it does signify that some pretty significant things are occurring in your body when you smoke. It typically doesn’t affect new smokers but it will often bother people who smoke heavily, especially over a period of many years. A specific process causes smoker’s cough, and though the term relates to smoking, it can also occur in people who are routinely exposed to other throat, nasal and lung irritants over a period of several years. Tiny fibers in the nose and the trachea called cilia operate by pushing irritants out of the body. When you smoke, you begin to damage these cilia, sometimes nearly killing them or making them completely nonfunctional. When you go through periods of not smoking, like when you’re sleeping at night, your damaged cilia can’t move the phlegm up to your throat where you can swallow it. Smoking does cause extra mucus to develop in order to get foreign toxins out of your lungs. The result of smoker’s cough for most people is
