E-cigarettes ‘Potentially as Harmful as Tobacco Cigarettes’
today.uconn.edu
today.uconn.edu
I don't like the way they've titled their research. Given that there are numerous chemical additives in traditional chemical cigarettes that are known to cause health issues nicotine may not be the dominantly harmful component in cigarettes.
Discouraging cigarette smokers from moving to e-cigarettes is akin to abstinence only programs, it's not a pragmatic approach to the realities of the problem and human behavior. Of course the tobacco industry also has a vested interest in cigarettes so it's favorable to them for media to be as negative as possible about eCigarettes.
If eCigarette second hand smoke is less harmful than cigarettes and they aren't banned in the places that regular cigarettes are it would create a strong downward pressure on traditional cigarette smoking...
..and it looks like the Altria group does recruit from UConn, if that actually means anything.
So even if I smoke 30% more than I used to I'm probably consuming significantly less harmful chemicals in the end, including nicotine. Which means it will probably be easier to quit vaping than cigarettes, especially as I could taper the nicotine percentage from 6mg -> 0mg over a period of time without adjusting behaviour.
On the other hand I hardly ever felt any vapour smell from e-cigarettes.
Also... Smoke is a mixture of gas and solid materials, while vapour is a mixture of gas and liquid.
I think using precise terms in a debate brings extra clarity into it, so instead of inventing poetic proxy terms, like e-smoke, let's just use the more commonly understood word "vapour" instead.
I knew a friend with a much, much worse smell allergy where a smell of the right color dye would cause seizures and possibly kill them.
To combat this, tobacco companies put some sugar on the filter tip and I believe better tobacco in the very tip of the cigarette, this way the first hit is better than all of the others.
It might just be the placebo effect that makes it taste better after, but who cares?
I read a study showing that the absorption rate of nicotine is about half through an e-cigarette, because of other chemicals in normal cigarettes that increase the rate.
I went to an 80 year old's birthday party recently and he has been smoking since WW2 or thereabouts. His advice - get a pipe and buy tobacco from a proper tobacconist. In that way he avoids all the chemical horrors of regular hand rolling tobacco. Normally this stuff has flavours in it, stuff to make it burn and stuff to keep it moist. The difference is huge.
My advice to the government is to ban adulterated tobacco products so only dry rolling tobacco is for sale. Then to apply a minimum age to buy tobacco with this age rising one year every other year. In a relatively short period of time tobacco will become as rare as pipe smoking is.
Pipe tobacco isn't that much "safer", either.
Ideally, you'd get all the addicts to move to e-cigs, and everybody else to not use either one. Not that I have any brilliant ideas how to accomplish that.
If the risk profile for cigarettes is just barely too high for a non-smoker then e-cigarettes may be the last 'push' Although this does require some assumptions about why individuals start smoking cigarettes in the first place.
In any case, it seems like much of the e-cig debate comes down to this. Those in favor see it as an alternative to cigarettes for smokers. Those against see it as a way to get non-smokers to consume tobacco.
I expressed skepticism that burning random chemicals and inhaling the resulting smoke is healthy. Good to have some evidence to back that up.
Why? If it doesn't have health costs, there's not much reason you should care. This study isn't even on the same planet as measuring health costs.
Same goes for almost everything.
To the first order of approximation, nicotine addiction is bad for your health because it causes you to burn and inhale plant matter, the common delivery methods of nicotine are horribly unhealthy but if you're talking about nicotine as such (for example, through a transdermal patch) then it doesn't really have significant adverse health effects.
But more to the point, there was little reason to believe it would cause cancer in the first place, compared to any other random compound. Its association with tobacco is a wash, because other compounds, like aldehydes, are completely sufficient to explain the carcinogenicity of smoking tobacco.
Everything in it is evidenced by as much research as they can get.
https://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/reports/50-years-of-p...
I agree that it's a bad idea to take nicotine in any form unless you need to, but it seems that nicotine is one of the less harmful parts of tobacco.
For chewing tobacco it's probably not the nicotine that's causing cancer, but all the other stuff.
Just like a light hit on the head would increase awareness, but increasing the force and repetition of the hits on the head is not well advised, when the effect wears off after overuse - to say nothing about the immediate effect of getting hit.
The perceived short term benefits are only secondary effects. And with regards to nicotine, all the arguments in favor are to be treated as extraordinary claims.
I wonder how the testing methodology works.
For analysis of nicotine as such, you can refer to the known side-effects of nicotine dermal patches; they're well researched, approved by FDA, etc - the place of application can get skin irritation and itchiness; overdose of nicotine can get dizziness, headache, rapid heartbeat, and nausea (same as for too much nicotine through other means), but they're not known to cause cancer or other significant damage despite being used by very many people over very long time.
Nicotine also has benefits - most notably, it is a stimulant. The question is what tradeoffs you are making by consuming nicotine.
I'd suppose other chemicals in traditional cigarettes fill very similar roles.
Imagine you want your house to smell like coffee. So you heat a baking tray until it is white hot. Then drip coffee onto the tray (don't actually try this). Much of the coffee will be vaporized with the water in it providing a nice aroma. But some of it will be in direct contact with the tray and will burn and have a nasty smell. The hotter the tray is, the more the coffee gets burned and transformed into not-coffee. E-cigs are like that, except one doesn't notice the nasty aroma of the accidental chemicals.
It should also be noted that abstinence only sex ed usually involves many outright lies, such as that sex outside of marriage is objectively immoral, that waiting until marriage prevents STIs, vastly exaggerated figures for the risk of disease and failure rates of birth control, etc. Whereas smoking is actually dangerous, and "don't smoke, it'll greatly increase your chances of getting these various horrible diseases" is actually truthful.
Though I think the true implication is "don't have sex until an impulse comes along to do so, that is strong enough to completely drown out the voice of your superego in your head. And then—if the impulse really is that strong—the 'proper' order to do things is to get married to that person, and then have sex with them."
All I ever see is picture of black lungs, messages of certain cancer and death. To me, this is like those people who have pictures of dead fetuses for their anti-abortion message. It's extreme, and sets of red-flags in my brain.
I fucking love smoking. It gives me a way to chill out and unwind for 10-15 minutes. It's great for my mental health, because I won't do it in my house... I have to get away from the computer, I have to stop what I'm doing. It gets me away from everything.
"Light and intermittent smoking carry nearly the same risk for cardiovascular disease as daily smoking.... In addition, the risk of ischemic heart disease in light-smoking men and women aged 35 to 39 years who smoke 1 to 4 cigarettes per day is nearly 3 times that of a nonsmoker."
http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/121/13/1518
There's nothing wrong with taking a calculated risk, but it is a risk.
I expect it's still a significant health risk, but I've never seen studies on people who don't smoke daily.
How the damage happens is not important, but consider the possibility of slowly accumulating effects because of a slow rehabilitation potential.
Me too. I haven't had a cigarette in over a decade, but I remain hopeful that modern science will find a cure for cancer and other smoking-related diseases during my lifetime, so I can resume smoking again. This probably sounds nuts to non-smokers and I won't bother explaining it any further.
As an aside, I am one of many who tried e-cigarettes when they came out because they were very convenient, and ended up quitting. They were new and not banned anywhere yet, so I could 'smoke' even more. I never liked smoking indoors and do not like the stale tobacco smell so they were great. For reasons I don't really understand my tobacco habit gradually tapered off and I no longer smoke anything, but I do miss it.
I think I have heard this from a couple of e-cigarette using colleagues: once the switched to e-cigarettes stopping became easier.
(One of them explained that he used weaker and weaker refills until it was basically just water. I guess at that point it just feels stupid.)
First of all, I envy you. You're a "chipper" and make up about 5% of the population of smokers. I on the other hand am in the Majority. It's either zero or a pack a day. The black lung photos didn't contribute to my cessation. Instead I had to grow up and decide I didn't like feeling like garbage. That said, If the black lung applies to that 95% of us that can't stop at just one, it's probably the right message.
5% source: http://articles.latimes.com/1996-09-18/news/ls-44883_1_heavy...
Getting back to the original topic, we need to know more information about the other additives in e-cigs as well. There are kids at my child's high-school that smoke non-nicotine e-cigs supposedly because they like the taste (they come in fruity flavors).
And in that cotext such dismissive reaction makes sense to me.
That agreement isn't working very well, lots of sellers will sell to people who say "I've never smoked".
It's a shame, because that's the kind of thing that could force more regulation.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39523857
> The Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH) said 87% of shops were knowingly or unwittingly prepared to sell e-cigarettes to people who have never smoked or vaped.
The whole idea seems kind of pointless. If someone want to vape, let them.
I think there's been a little bit of research showing some young people moving to smoking from vaping.
Based on your above comment, it sounds like you think that they tested for nicotine specifically. They did not. From the press release:
There are potentially hundreds of chemicals in e-cigarettes that could be contributing to DNA damage, Kadimisetty says. Rather than test for all of them, the UConn team targeted three known carcinogenic chemicals found in tobacco cigarettes. They then loaded their device’s microwells with specific enzymes that would convert those chemicals into metabolites. If these chemicals were in the sample, the test gave them a reading for genotoxicity. If the chemicals were not present, there would be no reaction.
Based on that paragraph, and other sentences throughout the press release, my interpretation is that their findings are that e-cigarettes are potentially as harmful as cigarettes. Some of the comments in this thread make it sounds like the researchers showed that just the nicotine in e-cigarettes is as potentially harmful as just the nicotine in cigarettes, but that's not my reading.
E-cigarette liquid, at it's base, has two chemicals: propylene glycol and nicotine.
Anything other than that is a flavor additive, or a smoke volume additive (glycerine). PG and Glycerine are extensively studied and safe for human consumption, PG is actually used in nebulizer treatments for people with asthma.
Furthermore, a proper e-cigarette doesn't cause a chemical change in the liquid- it's only a physical state change. That precludes the oxidation reactions that characterize tobacco smoking.
So my skepticism is really tweaked by this article. Yes, someone could potentially add hundreds of flavoring chemicals. Definitely room for a problem there, so address that. The essential cigarette is only two to three chemicals.
While I'm not sure what temperature these devices target, what I know is that the researchers found that longer into a usage session the coils became hotter and produced larger quantities carcinogens.
My understanding though is that while e-cigarettes do produce carcinogens, they produce less quantities than regular cigarettes do.
I guess you had the link to the survey ready and just forgot to paste it. Would you find that again, please?
A successful vaporization requires temperatures of 150-200°C with a max of 250 for self-experimenting enthusiasts.
So when these studies include the chemicals caused by pyrolysis, they're not studying realistic e-cigarette use.
A good analogy would be studying the consumption of improperly distilled alcohol that included methanol- EXCEPT you wouldn't be able to taste the methanol in bad liquor, and you'd absolutely be able to taste burnt e-liquid.
Which of course doesn't mean it is good for us but I think establishes that the danger from that is probably less scary than that sounds
So, yes, I agree: this warrants much further study. I have not come to any conclusions, but I have updated my priros. But, independent of that, I felt some comments in this thread were misrepresenting what the research did.
The authors' title, as it appears in the journal the study was submitted to is "Automated 3-D Printed Arrays to Evaluate Genotoxic Chemistry: E-Cigarettes and Water Samples" (see http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acssensors.7b00118).
The "E-cigarettes ‘Potentially as Harmful as Tobacco Cigarettes’" title comes from "UConn Today", a university news site.
Just to be clear that the academics didn't choose this silly title.
Ultimately, like smoking, using e-cigarettes is smelly and unhealthy. Regulators aren't going to allow for them to be presented as harmless because they aren't and science isn't going to ignore the harmful effects because they do exist. The only reason e-cigarettes are not banned in all the places cigarettes are is because the rules are about burning tobacco and politics makes it difficult to change the rules.
That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. A demonstration of the toxicity of e-cigs should be based on well-established testing methods. And a new testing device should be tested to see if it reliably replicate findings that used well-established testing methods.
There's a lot about the article that smells bad.
> "potentially as harmful"
> "may contain"
> "have as much potential to cause DNA damage"
> "found that vapor from non-nicotine e-cigarettes caused as much DNA damage as filtered cigarettes" (at best they have a theory)
> "whether they serve as a gateway for future tobacco smokers remains the subject of much debate" (if you call lobbyist propoganda "debate")
> "new metabolites that have the potential to cause DNA damage are formed"
> "The device is unique in that it converts chemicals into their metabolites during testing, which replicates what happens in the human body, Kadimisetty says." (Does it? Is this scientifically confirmed with high certainty?)
> "Bioassays currently used to determine the genotoxicity of environmental samples may be more comprehensive" ("May" be? If you are speculating on that, then how do you know that the results from these tests are trustworthy, as you are claiming?)
> "There are potentially hundreds of chemicals in e-cigarettes that could be contributing to DNA damage, Kadimisetty says." (Well, depends on your definition of chemicals)
> "Rather than test for all of them, the UConn team targeted three known carcinogenic chemicals found in tobacco cigarettes." (Oh? Which ones? And what was the source of the ejuice used for testing?)
EDIT: The three chemicals (thanks xaedes): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14539062
B[a]P: Benzo[a]pyrene
NNK: 4-(methylnitrosamino)-1-(3-pyridyl)-1-butanone
NNN: N-Nitrosonicotine
I haven't a clue what these are, and in which component of the juice (PG, VG, nicotine, flavor) would contain them....anyone?
> "potentially as harmful"
That's not 'defensive language', that's rightly acknowledging that a single study isn't enough to determine one way or the other.
> "have as much potential to cause DNA damage"
What's 'unscientific' or 'defensive' about acknowledging that a substance has a certain probability of causing cell damage? Claiming that something 'always' or 'never' causes cell damage, on the other hand, would be unscientific.
When read by a scientist, when read by mainstream consumers it is historically referred to as FUD.
> "have as much potential to cause DNA damage"
"potential" vs "as much potential"....so how are they measuring the level of potential? Since this is new technology, is it even proven accurate (cast is doubt elsewhere in the document).
This article implies certainty, but of course never states it outright, but it achieves its goal: instill fear. And in this case, that fear can affect sales in the hundreds if not billions of dollars, and might(!) literally be the the difference between life and death for hundreds of thousands if not millions of people.
Benzo[a]pyrene is a product of incomplete combustion and is basically found wherever organic stuff (in the carbon containing sense) is burned with low available oxygen. It's super carcinogenic by way of intercalating between DNA basepairs leading to misread transcripts. Since nothing is being burned in a vaporizer unless something has horribly gone wrong, this is highly unlikely to be present in vapor.
> NNK: 4-(methylnitrosamino)-1-(3-pyridyl)-1-butanone
> NNN: N-Nitrosonicotine
These are nitrated derivatives of nicotine. If they were in the eliquid, it's likely due to impurities in the nicotine. However, it's been previously shown [1] that they're not present in vapor in any significant quantity.
I can't get past the paywall, so I couldn't say if they give any justification for whether their sensor would be a good indication of in vivo behavior or not. In order for dangerous DNA damage to occur, the offending compound (or relevant metabolite) would have to get into cell nuclei in meaningful quantities, which is far from a given.
A few years ago I read a convincing article to the contrary from the NHS. Detailing how the most dangerous carcinogens came from combustion of tobacco.
Smoking related signalling has been a train wreck for a decade or more now, so of course after this article came out the very same NHS started talking about banning certain types of e-cigarettes. I don't know what's going on anymore. It doesn't help that there are zealots that spam information about e-cigarettes being perfectly safe, and charities that spam information about cigarettes killing you and everyone around you so donate right away.
The internet has utterly failed us on data about smoking. If anyone knows what's actually going on, then they are lost in a sea of other people that are doing their best to shout over one another.
Lol - like most of the modern world - Internet or not. :)
Wikipedia seems fairly rational about nicotine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine
It seems to boil down to "mostly harmless" whereas all the delivery technologies for it, other than the patch, seem to be almost infinitely more dangerous than the nicotine itself.
From the Wikipedia article:
> by the 1980s the use of nicotine insecticide had declined below 200 tons. This was due to the availability of other insecticides that are cheaper and less harmful to mammals.
> Currently, nicotine, even in the form of tobacco dust, is prohibited as a pesticide for organic farming in the United States/
Actually the thing that pisses me off about e-cigs is the clouds of flavoured vapour that I get bombarded with. I don't want to inhale second hand raspberry flavoured steam.
Though quite happy inhaling diesel particles every day no doubt?
What leads you to that conclusion?
No, I do not _happily_ inhale diesel particles ever.
Luckily I live in a country where diesel pollution is now taken seriously so the problem is declining but the use of e-cigarettes is increasing.
I would have liked to see control experiments: analyse the e-liquid without vaporization, and analyse pure glycerol/propylene glycol. The former may show a response, but the latter should not show any at all.
when used normally, the ecig should only vaporize the PG and nicotine (2 ingredients). if you burn the mixture, that's where you get a cocktail of chemicals akin to a cigarette
it's admittedly hard to describe but a really vital difference. its the difference between warming a cookie and burning a cookie. the soot from the burnt cookie is way more toxic than a properly warmed cookie
that said, i welcome more information about e-cigs for sure. but as an ex-smoker who used ecigs's step-down method and finally quit last year, we need to be very careful before crucifying this very effective cessation device
The fact remains, folks using e-cigarettes are still inhaling dangerous chemicals. You'd have to be crazy to suggest this is probably not dangerous. Just because it's delivered slightly differently doesn't really make it ok.
Edit: And I do accept that vaping is probably not safe, and I'm cool with that. Not everyone has their vices but I have mine.
They might be, or might not. It never fails to amaze me that a pill is hyper regulated, food is somewhat regulated, and at least where I live vape juice is completely unregulated for a couple more years. Whats in there, THC, benzene, used engine oil, who knows.
Obviously its trivial to make a substance that when vaporized is harmless; consider pure distilled filtered water. Its a hair trickier to supply nicotine with the vapor. But when they go all ochem crazy with flavors and smells, who knows whats in there and how long the users will live.
The FDA is moving extremely slowly on regulating vape juice. In a couple years it'll at least be licensed and documented. Until recently it was complete wild west.
I've never seen the FDA move on anything so slowly. There must be a lot of political money involved.
Quite the opposite, it’s lack of money. The FDA moves fast in fields and products where they already have budget and staff allocated to doing it. They’re slow about moving to regulate new things because, unless there is a concomitant increase in budget, they have to move people off of work on one thing and on towards another. This, of course, has all sorts of inter-departmental politics involved as branch managers measure the sizes of the peens by how much budget and staff they have under them.
Incidentally, a lot of the money about FDA’s regs in this area are actually coming from the cigar industry which fears, more than anything, being subjected to the same regulatory nightmare that the cigarettes manufacturers are mired in.
The manufacturers know. Acting as if it is a complete mystery is disingenuous.
http://www.webmd.com/smoking-cessation/news/20150218/e-cigar...
>The results of one FDA review of 18 different e-cigarette cartridges found toxic and carcinogenic chemicals in some but not others. All but one of the cartridges labeled “no nicotine” did, in fact, contain nicotine. The authors suggest that “quality control processes used to manufacture these products are inconsistent or non-existent.”
> Flavorings: Goniewicz says hundreds of flavors exist, including cherry, cheesecake, cinnamon, and tobacco. Many of those flavoring chemicals, he says, are also used to flavor food.
>“These are the big unknowns,” he says. “When we eat them, they are safe, but we don’t know what’s going on when we inhale them.”
a) Do you honestly think companies would do this?
b) The same silly "risk" applies to most any manufacturer - having a "regulation" in no way guarantees your cereal manufacturer isn't putting poison in your cereal, because why wouldn't he, right? (To use similar logic).
> The results of one FDA review of 18 different e-cigarette cartridges found toxic and carcinogenic chemicals in some but not others.
And the source manufacturer (country) of these? Zero details, as usual. Shall we stop selling infant formula in the US because infant formula contains melamine which can and does kill people? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal
If these agencies weren't deliberately so opaque, I'd perhaps be less distrustful.
Perfectly fair final point on inhalation of flavors, and good luck finding anyone in the industry that is opposed to further testing. Everyone very much wants a safe product.
And um, yes, the supplement industry is essentially unregulated and is notorious for doing exactly that - putting random shit in there that hasn't been tested for safety and isn't listed on the label. That's up to and including controlled prescription medications.
https://www.livescience.com/40357-herbal-products-unlisted-i...
https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/21/dangerous-dietary-...
Nor did I ever say, or even imply, we should stop selling e-cigs or any other product for that matter.
The point is, we have uncertainty being printed as confirmed danger, in a billion dollar industry (with a very well documented history of deceit) selling a product known to kill, at risk of being completely disrupted. Pardon me if I'm a little skeptical of misleading claims.
A very different mix of chemicals. Even if current mixes are terrible, it should be possible to find options that are a lot better.
except it's not a "fact". The fact that it is not "a fact" is precisely why you see studies coming out time and time again which attempt to figure out exactly which byproducts of the VG, PG, and Nicotine are created and how they affect the body.
This is also laughable considering how utterly terrible cigarette smoke is—I can't even imagine how I would make a vapor that harmful without combusting something.
This is exactly the type of study you see when someone has it out for e-cigarettes. Who is it? I smell Philip Morris cash.
I mean, it wouldn't be hard. Plenty of simple chemical reactions produce dangerous vapors.
So in other words, less dangerous. (Given that most of the harms caused by smoking don't come from DNA damage.)
I generally take a pretty cynical look at scientific findings that help protect multi-billion dollar industries.
The claim in the title is utterly false because nicotine isn't the only health risk issue with tobacco cigarettes. Essentially the results show that vaporized chemical nicotine can cause the same amount of damage regardless of how the chemical was vaporized. In summary they proved the obvious.
Edit: The term 'potential' in the research has a very clear and rigorous meaning, the term 'potential' in the title is clickbait bullshit.
Anytime results are not conclusive but still point towards a certain outcome?
The use of E-cigarettes should be encouraged as a middle-ground to cure (yes cure, addiction is a disorder) those who still smoke.
2. "...when it comes to causing DNA damage" is the far less sensationalist claim in the actual text.
E-Cigs potentially saved my sons life. He grew up around smokers. I had no control over this. Now that he lives with me, I fully support the use of E-Cigs. He has almost stopped using E-Cigs and he has stopped smoking tar+tobacco cigarettes completely.
Traditional cigarettes for certain are carcinogens and there is no dispute they cause cancer and kill people.
Saying "e-cigarettes" is nonsensical. There are 1000s of varieties of vaporizers and liquids. I'd wager if you take some bright, sketchy liquid from the corner vape shop and combine it with a $10 generic imported vaporizer there is going to be some significant deviation with impurities/toxins relative to e.g. JUUL or other products sold by a company that frankly has something to lose if they get sued.
As far as I understand, most of the unexpected chemicals are coming from vaporization or reactions based on the flavorings that were never designed for that. Or vaporizers that are poorly constructed and burn glue/adhesives/etc from the device as well as the liquid. So again you'd want to focus on those individual components or chemicals, and it makes no sense to generalize "e-cigarettes" by analysis of any one (for better or worse).
Also, not intuitively buying without far more evidence that vaporizing glycol/glycerine, nicotine, and water shares a rough equivalence in DNA damage potential to the raw combustion products of unfiltered cigarettes. There are some 7000 chemicals in tobacco smoke, and the list of the known carcinogens is over a page long on Wikipedia... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cigarette_smoke_carcin...
It can be better, or the same. Can't be worse, and you might leave it altogether in the end if you make the switch.
I use unflavored e-juice. It's VG, PG, and nicotine. Three ingredients.
> "...the UConn team targeted three known carcinogenic chemicals..."
> "...something in the e-cigarettes was definitely causing damage to the DNA."
What three carcinogenic chemicals did they test for? I hate when these studies are locked behind a paywall.
NNK: 4-(methylnitrosamino)-1-(3-pyridyl)-1-butanone
NNN: N-Nitrosonicotine