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Comment by voldacar | Hacker News Reader

Vaping doesn't deposit nitrosamines, polycyclic hydrocarbons and tar in your lungs though? I don't see how it warrants comparison

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Nicotine itself incurs DNA damage and is suspected to be a carcinogen.

I've yet to find conclusive research backing this up. Got any sources?

Analysis of nicotine-induced DNA damage in cells of the human respiratory tract https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22001448/

Props for the link, but the full text seems to be pay walled?

And the important bit seems to be

>nicotine concentration between 0.001 mM and 4.0mM.

And they found an effect starting at 1.0mW. But, this is what I hate about pretty much all scientific papers that clearly set out with a purpose in mind (good or bad) is the abstract doesn't mention what the hell 1.0mW. Is that even a feasible amount? Is that one puff? Is that 100% nicotine being directly vaped? What on earth is it? None of this is mentioned, for free anyways.

It's molar concentration, the study doesn't really mention it directly of course. 1mM is probably high since they're looking at what concentration of tobacco causes DNA damage in e.g., a cavity, but the study doesn't think it's unreasonable. Other studies in animals used up to 4mM.

The full study can be found as the first article in this pdf: http://tobacco.cleartheair.org.hk/wp-content/uploads/2018/01...

The full study mentions that other studies found nasal snuff produced the highest plasma nicotine concentration at 0.8 uM, with speculation that a large (emphasis mine) pinch would produce mM concentrations in the nasal cavity, right on target for observed DNA damage, yet incidents of nasal cancer among western nasal snuff users are practically unheard of. Similarly, rates of oral cancer among Swedish Snus users are so low that several studies now have failed to find any association with oral cancer.

This says nothing about rates of other non-site specific cancers of course (pancreatic being a big one), or the other health risks that are still associated with smokeless tobacco (stroke, cardiovascular disease, impotency), but it's somewhat telling that even anti-nicotine advocacy groups rarely mention the risk of cancer for smokeless tobacco products in their publications.

I would love to see sources on this. All research I've seen about nicotine and cancer is that it can help a tumor grow faster but it cannot induce damage to DNA.

The "At least I'm not shooting heroin into my eyeballs" argument doesn't float.

Nobody is making that argument. They're making the argument that the danger of vaping isn't at the same scales as the danger of cigarettes. Or rather, they're pointing it out, because that fact is not particularly controversial.

That is exactly the argument being made.

My remark was about young people doing something that is idiotic (vaping to the degree they do it) who would not take a puff on a cigarette. Arguments that vaping is "less dangerous than smoking" are precisely "At least I'm not shooting heroin in my eyeballs", because at no point did I assert that they were equivalent.

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