This archive report was first published on 18 December 2019.
Published on December 18, 2019, a study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine has shed light on the risks associated with e-cigarette use. The research, conducted by scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), found that current and former e-cigarette users were 1.3 times more likely to develop chronic lung disease.
The study, which tracked e-cigarette and tobacco habits as well as new lung disease diagnoses in over 32,000 American adults from 2013 to 2016, also found that tobacco smokers increased their risk by a factor of 2.6. For people who both smoked and vaped, the risks of developing lung disease more than tripled.
According to senior author Stanton Glantz, a UCSF professor of medicine, "e-cigarettes are harmful on their own, and the effects are independent of smoking conventional tobacco." The study did not offer a new biological explanation for how vaping causes such harm, but cited earlier physiological studies that have found that e-cigarettes suppress the immune system and increase the levels of stress-related proteins in the lung.
While vaping advocates argue that e-cigarettes offer a less harmful alternative to smoking, Glantz noted that most participants in the study both smoked and vaped, and that switching from conventional cigarettes to e-cigarettes exclusively could reduce the risk of lung disease, but very few people do it.
