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Here are 4 things to know about e-cigarettes
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Here are 4 things to know about
e-cigarettes
1.
Electronic
Cigarette contain nicotine, which is addictive and can harm the developing
adolescent brain, said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at UC San
Francisco.
A lot of the kids who take up vaping are at low risk for
smoking, but once they start using e-cigarettes, they are three to four times
more likely to start using cigarettes, Glantz said.
“The biggest health
concern with e-cigarettes is they are prolonging and expanding the tobacco
industry,” he said.
Glantz, director of UCSF’s Center for Tobacco Control
Research and Education, said he was initially neutral on e-cigarettes, but now
finds them concerning. Among other hazards, e-cigarettes produce ultrafine
particles than can trigger inflammatory problems and lead to heart and lung
disease.
“The data is just becoming overwhelming,” Glantz said.
2.
E-cigarettes expose people to more than “harmless water vapor”; strictly
speaking, the vapor produced when users exhale is actually an aerosol that
contains a mixture of nicotine, flavorings and other ingredients that can be
toxic.
Stanford University pediatrics professor Bonnie Halpern-Felsher
has studied young people’s perceptions of e-cigarettes. In September, she
launched a free, downloadable youth tobacco prevention toolkit with an
e-cigarette module, funded by the UC Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program,
or TRDRP, and the California Department of Education.
“Youths are
definitely using e-cigarettes because they think they are cool,” Halpern-Felsher
said. “Adolescents and young adults don’t know a lot about e-cigarettes. They
think it’s just water or water vapor. They don’t understand it’s an aerosol.
They don’t understand that e-cigarettes can have nicotine. They don’t understand
that flavorants themselves can be harmful.”
3. The flavors can be toxic.
More than 7,000 varieties of flavored e-cigarettes are on the
market.
Prue Talbot, a UC Riverside professor of cell biology, screened
the cytotoxicity (quality of being toxic to cells) of 36 refill fluids and found
that some were highly toxic. The most cytotoxic flavor, Cinnamon Ceylon,
contained a chemical called cinnamaldehyde, which gives cinnamon its flavor and
whose side-effects may include coughing and sore throats.
Talbot has been
studying more flavors and is building a database to help determine the most
dangerous ones.
“Flavors are something that could be potentially
regulated,” Talbot said.
4. Vaping has secondhand and thirdhand effects.
Unlike cigarettes, which emit smoke from the lit end, e-cigarettes don’t produce
sidestream emissions between puffs, but they still generate secondhand and
thirdhand effects when users exhale the mainstream vapor.
In a
TRDRP-funded study, Berkeley Lab researcher Hugo Destaillats led a team that
found 31 chemicals that include several toxicants at significant levels in
e-cigarette vapor. The most toxic chemicals included acrolein, a severe eye and
respiratory irritant; and formaldehyde, an irritant and probable
carcinogen.
So, while e-cigarettes deliver fewer cancer-causing chemicals
than cigarettes, research has yet to reveal how e-cigarettes fully impact heart
and lung health and their cancer-causing potential, Glantz said.He estimates
that e-cigarettes are about one-third to one-half as dangerous as
cigarettes.u2022eney7485yyWEEEEDD
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