• Cardiovascular disease: Smoking greatly increases women's risk of heart disease and stroke. According to the American Heart Association, the risk for heart disease among middle-aged women who smoke is triple that of middle-aged non-smoking women.
• Reproductive health: Women smokers are at higher risk for pregnancy complications, early menopause, infertility, miscarriage, pre-term delivery, stillbirth, infant death and having low birth-weight babies. Smoking also doubles a woman's risk of cervical cancer.
• Children's health: Smoking increases the chances of sudden infant death syndrome, infant and perinatal deaths, learning disorders, attention deficit disorder and disruptive behavior. "If you bathe a fetus' brain in nicotine for nine months, it's clear there are profound effects," says Dr. Timothy McAfee, executive director for health promotion and disease prevention for Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound.
• Hormones: Smoking causes women to enter menopause sooner and interrupts the menstrual cycle. "It's also well established that the aging process — skin and wrinkles — is substantially faster in women who smoke," McAfee adds.
• Appearance and oral-related conditions: Tobacco increases the risk for periodontal disease and oral cancers and also leads to chronic bad breath, teeth staining, increased tartar deposits, tooth loss and exaggerated wrinkling in the face.

Five steps to kicking the habit — once and for all.
As any smoker who has tried to kick the habit can testify, there's nothing easy about arresting this addiction that has a starring role in the high rate of deaths from lung cancer and heart disease.