E-Cigarettes also Harmful

Vaping has been sold as a safer way to smoke, a way to get a nicotine high without the harmful effects of tobacco and smoke inhalation. But new research shows that inhaling nicotine as a vapour through e-cigarettes may damage the lungs, making them vulnerable to infection.

It may also generate the same kinds of harmful chemicals that smoking produces, the research found although at a smaller scale.

 For their research, scientists at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Health exposed mice to e-cigarette vapour in chambers. Levels of the vapour were measured to approximate the same levels of exposure for a person smoking e-cigarettes regularly for two weeks.

A second set of mice was exposed to normal air as a control. Then they tested to see how vulnerable each set of mice was to strains of pneumonia and sinusitis, and Influenza A.

They found that those mice that had been exposed to e-cigarette vapour were much more likely to develop compromised immune responses to the viruses and bacteria than those mice that hadn’t been exposed to the vapours. In some cases mice with the compromised immune systems died from the infections.

"The e-cigarette exposure inhibited the ability of mice to clear the bacteria from their lungs, and the viral infection led to increased weight loss and death indicative of an impaired immune response," Thomas Sussan, PhD, lead author and an assistant scientist said in a media report.

As part of their study, the Johns Hopkins researchers also tested e-cigarette vapour for the presence of free radicals toxins found in cigarette smoke and air pollution. They found that e-cigarette vapour contains far fewer free radicals than cigarette smoke, 1 percent as much but they were still present in e-cig vapours.

"We were surprised by how high that number was, considering that e-cigarettes do not produce combustion products," Sussan said. "Granted, it's 100 times lower than cigarette smoke, but it's still a high number of free radicals that can potentially damage cells."