A large long-term study concludes that e-cigarette smokers have a 30% increased risk of developing a chronic lung disease such as asthma, bronchitis or COPD. This risk is further multiplied by 2.6 for tobacco smokers.
Not only harmful to cardiovascular health, electronic cigarettes would considerably increase the risk of developing chronic lung disease.
This is the conclusion reached by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) after conducting a large longitudinal study of 32,000 Americans. In their work, published in theAmerican Journal of Preventive Medicine, they reveal that e-cigarette smokers run a risk up to 3 times higher of developing asthma, bronchitis, emphysema or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Those who also use tobacco are at even higher risk than those who use either product alone.
“E-cigarettes are inherently harmful”
To reach this conclusion, the researchers analyzed data from the national Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) survey, which tracked e-cigarette and tobacco habits as well as new diagnoses of respiratory diseases. in more than 32,000 American adults between 2013 and 2016.
“What we found was that for e-cigarette smokers, the risk of developing lung disease increased by about a third, even after controlling for tobacco use and clinical and demographic data,” explains Stanton Glantz, professor of medicine at UCSF and director of the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. “We concluded that e-cigarettes are harmful on their own and that their effects are independent of conventional smoking.”
A risk multiplied by three for smokers of e-cigarettes and tobacco
If smokers and ex-smokers of electronic cigarettes have a 1.3 times greater risk of developing chronic lung disease, tobacco smokers see their risk multiplied by 2.6. As for those who combine tobacco and e-cigarette use, their risk is multiplied by three. “Dual users — the most common usage pattern among people who use e-cigarettes — get the combined risk of e-cigarettes and conventional cigarettes, so they’re actually worse off than smokers. tobacco,” observes Professor Glantz.
For the researcher, only the “switch from conventional cigarettes to electronic cigarettes exclusively could reduce the risk of lung disease”. But, “very few people do it,” he notes. For the specialist, “this study contributes to demonstrating more and more that e-cigarettes have harmful long-term effects on health and aggravate the tobacco epidemic.”
The results are all the more worrying as they do not take into account the acute lung disease called EVALI (for “E-cigarette or Vaping Product Use-Associated Lung Injury”). which caused 39 deaths in the United States since the beginning of the year and which would be linked to a molecule, vitamin E acetate which, when heated and combined with cannabis oil, would turn into “glue” in the lungs.
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