Can smoking really cause psoriasis?

Psoriasis is a skin disease which causes redness and inflammation of the skin. The skin appears scaly and often the individual will feel pain, soreness, itching or burning. This is a chronic disease but is not usually life threatening. People with psoriasis can go through the same experiences of those with severe diseases. For some time, psoriasis has been linked to different causes. One of these causes is smoking. For many years there was no scientific evidence until recent years, such as the Nurse Health Study II publication.

Smoking and drinking top the vices of people in our society. Even in high school, teenagers start to experiment with these kind of fixes. Some will quit while others die due to ailments caused by smoking or drinking. In the United States alone, many of the population die due to smoking. The tobacco in cigarettes contains more than 4,000 chemicals that are toxic to the body. Every puff from a cigarette brings the smoker one step closer to a risk of illnesses of the throat, mouth, esophagus, heart, lungs, skin and others.

In 1985, O'Doherty and MacIntyre brought up the relationship of smoking and palmoplantar pustular psoriasis. Since then, many more studies have been conducted to prove this assumption.