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Comment by code_duck | Hacker News Reader

Inhaling nicotine is very harmful to your heart. Repeated doses of a stimulant can cause heart disease, and about as many smokers die from that as lung disease. With vaping, even more nicotine is delivered immediately to the system. It seems that this would have the same negative consequences on cardiac and vascular health. Why is that not more often discussed? It seems like this risk alone is enough to declare vaping to be unsafe.

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> about as many smokers die from that as lung disease

Heart disease is the leading killer in the US. Are you saying the number of excess deaths among smokers (over the baseline in the non-smoking population) is roughly equally distributed between heart disease and lung disease? Can you give a cite?

Around a third of smoking related deaths are from any cancer (not just lung disease), a third from heart disease, and a third from COPD. The most recent attorneys general report has the exact estimates.

Overall though, cancer is what I’d be by far the least concerned about with respect to vaping.

Because most of the cardiovascular risks of smoking aren't related to nicotine.

How do the CO risks compare with the nicotine risks? Because nicotine on its own does raise your blood pressure substantially.

This article argues that nicotine barely increases blood pressure, and nicotine replacement therapy is therefore safe in hypertensive individuals.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1524-6175...

What would they be related to, then? Other chemicals, or degraded respiration?

The chemicals produced from burning the tobacco and additives.

Combustion in general produces a bunch of nasty chemicals.

And do you know of any specific chemicals that would be? Don't we have to prove that they harm you, same as nicotine?

Can you cite any sources for this? AFAIK nicotine is not too different from caffeine as far as stimulants go. It’s demonized due to cigarettes.

Nicotine is far worse than caffeine.

It basically works as an accelerant, stimulating and encouraging tumor growth and metastasis.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3915512/#S7titl...

"Nicotine, which is the addictive component of tobacco smoke, is unable to initiate tumorigenesis in humans and rodents; at the same time, nicotine has been shown to promote tumor growth and metastasis by inducing cell cycle progression, epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT), migration, invasion, angiogenesis, and evasion of apoptosis in a variety of systems (8–13). In addition, nicotine has been shown to induce secretion of growth factors and cytokines altering the physiology of multiple organ systems (8–13). These observations suggest that nicotine likely contributes to the progression and metastasis of tumors that are initiated by tobacco carcinogens."

Caffeine would be far worse for you if inhaled versus oral ingestion due to how quickly it affects your body. The same is true for cocaine or amphetamines, all of these drugs falling under the category of CNS stimulant. Oral cocaine would be far safer than the ways it is commonly used. Similarly, oral nicotine would be much safer.

Then where is the similar outcry against caffeine consumption? It's a stimulant too, so if we're going with the unscientific theory of "stimulants cause heart disease" then coffee consumption should be an alarming public health crisis.

There is concern about coffee for various reasons. But the main difference here is that you don’t smoke coffee, or caffeine in general. See info on meth for why smoking stimulants is worse for your heart than oral ingestion.

well, seems like it’s not true with coffee.

my understanding of the risks of heart disease and stroke affiliated with smoking is that they’re primarily due to the fact that regular smokers are living their lives in a permanent state of mild carbon monoxide poisoning. CO has a time course on the order of about 10 hours, so if you have more than two smoke breaks a day, your hemoglobin supply is semi-permanently compromised ...

People don’t smoke or vape coffee. When you ingest a drug orally, it typically takes many minutes or even hours to take effect, versus minutes or seconds for smoking. This principle is well known in studying things like cocaine abuse. Slower onset is less damaging to your body systems and also less likely to create addiction.

Interesting, could you link some research where I can dig in more? I have read that nicotine itself is not harmful, about on par with caffeine. I’m interested in reading more about the risk of inhaling it.

I don't research this professionally or as a hobby. Your googling would be as good as mine.

I tried to find evidence for your claim and could not. So, I downvoted you.

Gosh, that's personal. I'm going to assume you mean that you downvoted my comment.

Here, I found this after approximately 15 seconds of research

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363846/

"Nicotine poses several health hazards. There is an increased risk of cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal disorders. There is decreased immune response and it also poses ill impacts on the reproductive health. It affects the cell proliferation, oxidative stress, apoptosis, DNA mutation by various mechanisms which leads to cancer. It also affects the tumor proliferation and metastasis and causes resistance to chemo and radio therapeutic agents. The use of nicotine needs regulation. The sale of nicotine should be under supervision of trained medical personnel."

The ease of locating this leads me to believe it would be simple to find additional support for the idea that nicotine is not entirely benign. I am not going to take the time to do this, even though that risks a downvote on HN.

Not everyone vapes with nicotine though.

Agreed. I doubt if there’s much risk in vaping CBD, for instance.

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