When something is going wrong in your body, there will be signs. They may be subtle, but they are visible in close observation. If you are a smoker, you may be worried about the smell of smoke emanating from your mouth or clothes. However, there are other signs that tell whether you smoke or not and these signs are difficult to get rid of!

Smoking is the harmful act of inhaling tobacco infused smoke and is a common activity all over the world. According to the Center of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), over 480,000 deaths happen each year due to smoking or smoke inhalation. The organization explained that smoking causes harm to nearly all organs and quitting lowers the risk of early death and other smoking related diseases.

Like many other substances, there are clear tell-tale signs when someone is smoking. This is especially important for finding lung problems like Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which is a lung disease that makes it hard to breathe, sooner so people can get help.

Why Does Smoking Affect Your Physical Appearance?

Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) explains that tobacco smoke has more than 7,000 harmful chemicals like nicotine, carbon monoxide, and various metals like arsenic, cadmium, and lead, quickly reach your lungs and then travel through your blood to all your organs, including your skin. Smoking damages your skin's ability to heal because it increases an enzyme metalloproteinase (MMPs) that breaks down collagen. Collagen is what keeps your skin smooth and elastic. As you lose collagen, your skin sags. Squinting from the smoke and puckering your mouth when smoking also cause wrinkles around your eyes and mouth.

Smoking also reduces blood flow to your skin, which means it gets less oxygen and nutrients. All these things together lead to what doctors call a "smoker's face." Quitting smoking can help prevent or slow down these skin problems."

Visible Signs Of Smoking

Here are some visible signs of smoking in people, according to 2013, Lung India

Fingers and Nails

When people smoke, the tar and other chemicals in the smoke stick to their fingers and nails. This repeated contact causes a yellow stain that's hard to wash off. It's a very common sign that someone regularly handles cigarettes or biris.

Moustaches

Especially in older people with white moustaches, smoking causes a yellowing effect. This is most noticeable in the center of the moustache, where the smoke from the nose directly hits the hair. The consistent exposure to smoke colors the hair over time.

Lips

Heavy smokers often have a bluish-black tint to their lips. This discoloration happens because the chemicals in tobacco smoke affect the blood flow and the color of the skin on the lips. The constant exposure changes the lip's natural color.

Teeth

Smoking causes teeth to stain both inside and out. The outside of the teeth turns yellow from the tar, while the inside develops a brownish-black stain. This happens because the smoke seeps into the enamel and discolors the teeth over time.

Premature Wrinkling

Smoking makes the skin age faster. This leads to wrinkles like "crow's feet" around the eyes and "cobblestone wrinkles" on the neck. This happens because smoking reduces blood flow, limiting oxygen to the skin, and damages collagen, which keeps skin elastic.

Nodular Elastosis

This condition, also known as "Favre–Racouchot syndrome," causes blackheads and wrinkles, especially around the eyes and temples. It is made worse by both sun exposure and heavy smoking. The skin becomes discolored with visible nodules and wrinkles.

Facial Wrinkling and COPD

A study published in Thorax 2006 found a connection between wrinkles on the face and COPD, a lung disease. It's thought that smoking affects both the skin and lungs through similar processes. If doctors notice signs like "crow's feet" on a smoker's face, they might recommend tests for COPD. This early detection can help people get treatment sooner and improve their lung health.

While fevers are often overlooked and brushed aside or even managed with antibiotics — a dangerous trend — an alarmingly nationwide study linked it to infectious diseases with far-reaching consequences.

The report, based on data of over one lakh individuals in India with fever, between 2023 and 2025, showed that these were not vague or self-limiting, but in more than 30 percent or one-third cases had clear links to serious infections, such as dengue, and typhoid.

According to the report by healthcare diagnostics company Thyrocare, the fevers were mostly linked with

• typhoid – in over 18 percent cases
• dengue -- over 14 percent cases.
• Other diseases include malaria, chikungunya, and leptospirosis.

Presence Of Multiple Infections

Importantly, the findings highlighted the presence of co-infections in 10 per cent cases. The most common was a combination of dengue and typhoid.

Dr Preet Kaur, Chief Scientific Officer, Thyrocare, said that a significant number of patients carry serious infections, sometimes more than one at a time, revealing patterns that simple assumptions cannot capture.

"Beyond the visible rise in temperature, laboratory markers highlight hidden stress on organs, from drops in platelet counts to elevated liver enzymes, underscoring that fever is a systemic signal, not an isolated event," she added.

Also read: ‘Breakbone Fever’: US CDC Warns Of Dengue Surge Across 17 Countries

Further, the report noted that dengue positivity declined significantly over the three-year report period, malaria increased despite its lower overall base.

Typhoid and chikungunya rose in 2024 before easing in 2025 but remained present across the testing population.

Also read: Drug Resistance Driving Severe Typhoid Disease, Death Among Children Under-5s in India: Lancet Study

Fever: Men Vs Women

The report noted that more women were affected with typhoid than men. On the contrary, men reported more malaria cases.

More than 32 percent of females had fevers compared to 29 percent of men. Fevers in women was largely driven by higher typhoid detection (21 percent vs 15 percent).

Malaria affected men more than twice as often as women (1.1 percent vs 0.5 percent).

The lab reports also revealed key physiological markers such as platelet counts and liver function among people with fever, dengue, and malaria.

Low platelet levels were seen in

• 27 percent of patients with fever
• 80 percent malaria positive patients
• 37 percent dengue-positive patients

• All fever patients (56 percent) showed elevated SGOT levels and 37 percent SGPT
• Liver stress was seen across patients with dengue, malaria and leptospirosis.

Dengue cases rose throughout the year and typically peaked around October.

Typhoid positivity steadily fell from 2023 to its lowest in 2025. Despite a mild monsoon spike each year, 2025 remained consistently lower overall.

Chikungunya cases rose gradually from lower, volatile levels in 2023, peaked sharply in 2024, and moderated to a softer trend in 2025.

Malaria positivity remained relatively low overall but increased during the monsoon months, with transmission peaking between May and September.

Over the three-year period, malaria positivity rose from 0.5 percent to 1.1 percent, indicating a gradual increase despite its lower overall base.

New Delhi: There is a particular kind of frustration that comes with lying in bed, physically spent after a long day, and finding that sleep simply will not arrive. The body is done. The mind is not. This experience has a name in sleep medicine, and it is becoming less of an anomaly and more of a pattern for a growing number of people.

In an interview with Health and Me, Dr Shivani Swami, Additional Director – Pulmonology, CK Birla Hospitals, Jaipur, decoded the role of cortisol in affecting sleep and rest patterns.

The explanation starts with cortisol

Stress, whether from work pressure, unresolved worry, or the accumulated friction of a demanding day, keeps cortisol levels elevated into the evening. Cortisol is the hormone that keeps the brain alert and ready to respond. It has an important job during the day. The problem arises when it does not fall away as the evening progresses, which is what stress prevents. The brain receives no signal that the threat has passed, so it stays primed. Sleep requires the opposite of primed.

Screen use in the hours before bed adds another layer. The blue light that phones, laptops, and televisions emit suppresses melatonin, which is the hormone the body uses to initiate sleep. This is not a subtle effect. It shifts the body’s internal clock, making the brain read the late evening as daytime. People who spend an hour on their phone before bed are, in physiological terms, making sleep harder to reach.

Read more: Just 3 Nights Of Poor Sleep Is Enough To Harm Your Heart Health

Irregular schedules create their own complications

The body’s circadian rhythm is calibrated by consistency. When sleep and wake times shift from one day to the next, the rhythm loses its anchor. The body cannot predict when rest is coming, so it stops preparing for it at a reliable time. This is why erratic schedules, even among people who eventually get enough total sleep hours, tend to produce poor-quality rest.

The mental dimension sits separately from all of this. A mind that is processing, planning, replaying, or anticipating does not transition easily into sleep, regardless of how exhausted the body is. The cognitive activity itself is stimulating enough to override physical fatigue. This is what produces the wired quality that makes the tiredness feel irrelevant.

Left unaddressed, the pattern compounds

Shortened or fragmented sleep affects concentration, mood, immune function, and judgement. People become harder to disturb at first and then more fragile over time as the deficit accumulates.

What interrupts the cycle is not dramatic. A consistent bedtime and wake time, maintained even when it feels inconvenient, gives the circadian rhythm something to organise around. Screens set aside an hour before bed allow melatonin to do its work. A brief wind-down practice, whether reading, stretching, or simply sitting quietly, gives the brain a transition rather than asking it to move directly from full engagement to sleep. Stress that is processed during the day through breathing, reflection, or physical activity is less likely to resurface at night looking for somewhere to go.

Read more: Struggling With Sleep? Neurologist Shares 3 Simple Tips For Better Sleep Health

The ideal sleep set-up

A cool, dark, and quiet sleep environment reduces the stimulation the brain has to work against. None of these are large interventions. The difficulty is the consistency they require, which is harder to maintain than any single habit change.

When the pattern persists despite reasonable adjustments, it warrants clinical attention. Chronic sleep disruption rarely resolves without some form of structured support, and the longer it continues, the wider its effects spread.

Healthcare in India must move beyond curative treatments to include preventive and holistic health, said experts today.

Speaking at a public health event in New Delhi, organized by the Illness to Wellness Foundation, the experts stressed the need to integrate technology, tradition, and lifestyle interventions to build a healthier, more resilient population in the country.

“Healthcare is not limited to curative treatments. It includes preventive, promotive, palliative, and rehabilitative care, much of which happens within the community,” said Rajesh Bhushan, Former Secretary, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare.

He called for building a culture of health-seeking behavior through community-focused programs and technology integration.

“Technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can improve the efficiency and quality of healthcare delivery, when combined with systems of digital public health infrastructure, including the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) and the Ayushman Bharat Health Account (ABHA), which enable interoperability, longitudinal health records, and a more integrated healthcare ecosystem,” Bhushan added.

India today stands at a critical juncture in its healthcare journey. Rapid urbanization, changing lifestyles, rising stress levels, and increasing screen time are contributing to a growing burden of chronic conditions.

The experts argued that the real challenge will be to prevent disease and enable people to live healthier, longer, and more balanced lives.

Anil Rajput, Chairperson, Advisory Council, Illness to Wellness Foundation, urged for a more personalized and holistic understanding of health to build effective preventive systems.

Building Awareness On Healthcare

Dr. T S Kler, Chairman & HOD – BLK-Max Heart & Vascular Institute and Chairman Pan Max – Electrophysiology, spoke about the importance of leveraging public healthcare systems not only for treatment, but also for building awareness around health and prevention.

Amid rising cases of premature deaths linked to lifestyle risks and environmental factors, the experts advised keeping health as the foremost priority, far above all else.

"We must move towards an integrated, holistic model that combines allopathy with traditional systems of medicine, ensuring a more balanced and patient-centric approach. Equally important is the need to create greater awareness through continuous dialogue and education, as a lot can be achieved with the resources we already have,” said Dr. Kler, a Padma Bhushan awardee.

“The real shift we need is from managing disease to building a culture of health ownership. As stakeholders across sectors, our role is not just to develop systems, but to create awareness and belief that preventive and person-centric healthcare is achievable,” added Dr. Ravi Gaur, Co-Chair, FICCI Digital Health Task Force.

The event also featured a series of thematic discussions examining multiple dimensions of holistic health and well-being.

These include conversations around mental health as a critical component of productivity and daily life, with a focus on managing stress, addressing burnout, supporting students, and fostering more open and supportive environments across workplaces and educational institutions.