Why Tuberculosis Patients Should Quit Smoking

  Tuberculosis is a respiratory disease that often involves the alveolar parenchyma and interstitium. If you continue to smoke, your cough, sputum, hemoptysis and other symptoms will be aggravated by the original lesions, and the increased intrapulmonary pressure caused by coughing makes the blood vessels prone to rupture and life-threatening coughing up blood or even hemoptysis.  In addition, tuberculosis patients smoking can affect the efficacy of anti-tuberculosis drugs; research has shown that smoking can enhance liver enzyme activity, accelerate the metabolism of drugs in the liver, reducing the absorption and utilization of drugs, to the anti-tuberculosis drug rifampicin, for example: through the liver – intestinal circulation, oral administration of the drug can be rapidly absorbed, the drug concentration in the blood can reach a peak in 2 hours, but smokers increased liver enzyme activity, the drug in the liver However, smokers have increased liver enzyme activity and the metabolic process of the drug in the liver is accelerated, thus reducing the blood concentration of the drug by about 30% compared to nonsmokers, which affects the bactericidal efficacy of rifampicin.  In addition, smoking also affects the healing of tuberculosis lesions and worsens already quiescent lesions, thus prolonging the treatment time and increasing the dose of the drug, which not only increases the patient’s suffering but also increases the cost of treatment.