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> UConn researchers found that e-cigarettes loaded with a nicotine-based liquid are potentially as harmful as unfiltered cigarettes when it comes to causing DNA

• loeg 9y ago
  Even if e-cigs are equally harmful on a per-quantity basis (which I'm still somewhat skeptical of), an advantage over regular cigarettes is that you can consume less than one full cigarette at a time.
  • yladiz 9y ago
    Are there statistics or studies on how much one average person consumes from an e-cigarette compared to a regular cigarette?
    • dawnerd 9y ago
      100% anecdotal but the few people I know that use e-cigs are using them all day long. I'm just glad a lot of places treat it the same as smoking and ban it. Nothing worse than being in line with someone that thinks its cool to vape and blow huge clouds.
      • dmix 9y ago
        I smoke slightly more with ecigs than I did with cigarettes and I use the vape throughout the day. But whenever I have a real cigarette now I get a head rush and feel the nicotine quite strong, which is the feeling I would previously get with the first cigarette after the numerous times I quit smoking and started again. Clearly I'm using far less nicotine with e-cigarettes, which surprised me because I didn't notice any side effects (additional "niccing") when I switched to vaping last yr. So even if I smoke 30% more than I used to I'm probably consuming significantly less harmful chemicals in the end, including nicotine. Which means it will probably be easier to quit vaping than cigarettes, especially as I could taper the nicotine percentage from 6mg -> 0mg over a period of time without adjusting behaviour.
        • eyko 9y ago
          At 6mg -> 0mg I wouldn't say nicotine is a harmful chemical. It's a stimulant.
          • lloeki 9y ago
            I don't think the debate is that nicotine is harmful in such quantities, but it's a terribly addictive stimulant generally consumed with varyingly harmful chemicals, so easing it out to zero helps in quitting inhaling those chemicals altogether.
      • Udik 9y ago
        Apart from the obvious bad manners implied by blowing huge clouds of smoke in a space where people are tightly packed, as in a queue; what problem do you have with e-smoke exactly? The smell?
        • andrewflnr 9y ago
          The smell is often quite overpowering. I think "cloying" is the word; sometimes I feel like my airways are trying to close up.
        • pm90 9y ago
    • iaw 9y ago
      Anecdotally: my mother frequently smokes regular cigarettes, she'll light one for a few 'puffs' then put it out. To combat this, tobacco companies put some sugar on the filter tip and I believe better tobacco in the very tip of the cigarette, this way the first hit is better than all of the others.
      • an27 9y ago
        If you smoke anything in parts, it's well worth it to learn to purge. It's a cigar trick, you basically slowly blow through the cigar for a few seconds and it improves the taste and slows the burn for a while. It might just be the placebo effect that makes it taste better after, but who cares?
    • bobabooey02 9y ago
      I smoked cigarettes in the past and used ecigs to make cessation easier. When I switched, I used the vape more than cigarettes, but I also had a lot easier of a time quitting the vape(due to the lack of MAOI I believe). Even if people vape more than smoke, it may be worth it if they​ use it to successfully quit smoking altogether.
      • thanatropism 9y ago
        What, ordinary cigarettes have monoaminoxidase inhibitors?!
        • xkcd-sucks 9y ago
          Yes, as a component of tobacco, and it's basically the reason that tobacco is addictive http://www.jneurosci.org/content/25/38/8593 http://www.jneurosci.org/content/25/38/8593
    • collyw 9y ago
      In my personal experience more. I read a study showing that the absorption rate of nicotine is about half through an e-cigarette, because of other chemicals in normal cigarettes that increase the rate.
  • Theodores 9y ago
    The same can be said for pipe tobacco. I went to an 80 year old's birthday party recently and he has been smoking since WW2 or thereabouts. His advice - get a pipe and buy tobacco from a proper tobacconist. In that way he avoids all the chemical horrors of regular hand rolling tobacco. Normally this stuff has flavours in it, stuff to make it burn and stuff to keep it moist. The difference is huge. My advice to the government is to ban adulterated tobacco products so only dry rolling tobacco is for sale. Then to apply a minimum age to buy tobacco with this age rising one year every other year. In a relatively short period of time tobacco will become as rare as pipe smoking is.
    • stan_rogers 9y ago
      Most of the harmful chemicals aren't additives, they're combustion products that would be there no matter how the tobacco is cured and processed.
    • WorldMaker 9y ago
      Alternate anecdote: my grandfather smoked pipe tobacco for as long and died of heart failure complications due to lifelong nicotine usage, after already dealing with lung cancer-related illness. Pipe tobacco isn't that much "safer", either.
• mikeash 9y ago
  Discouraging smokers from moving to e-cigs is a bad idea, but discouraging non-smokers is a great idea. It's a tough tradeoff, and I don't think the analogy to sex ed is really a good one. Virtually everyone has sex, so teaching abstinence is foolish. But most people don't smoke, so saying "don't smoke, not even e-cigs" is a good thing for that segment of the population. Ideally, you'd get all the addicts to move to e-cigs, and everybody else to not use either one. Not that I have any brilliant ideas how to accomplish that.
  • iaw 9y ago
    > discouraging non-smokers is a great idea Thank you, I hadn't thought about that before and you're completely right. If the risk profile for cigarettes is just barely too high for a non-smoker then e-cigarettes may be the last 'push' Although this does require some assumptions about why individuals start smoking cigarettes in the first place.
    • mikeash 9y ago
      It's sort of like the classic market segmentation problem. Ideally you want to charge each customer the maximum price they're willing to pay, but it's hard to give different prices to different people. Likewise, you want to push each person towards the least harmful version of smoking or non-smoking they'll accept, but you can't tailor general advice like that. In any case, it seems like much of the e-cig debate comes down to this. Those in favor see it as an alternative to cigarettes for smokers. Those against see it as a way to get non-smokers to consume tobacco.
      • WorldMaker 9y ago
        Or even: get non-smokers to consume over-priced perfumes that have a good profit margin whether or not they contain tobacco/nicotine.
    • majewsky 9y ago
      Just this weekend, I saw a friend of mine vape who'd never touched a cigarette. His arguments were "Relax, it ain't a cigarette." and "I only vape for the taste of the liquid." I expressed skepticism that burning random chemicals and inhaling the resulting smoke is healthy. Good to have some evidence to back that up.
• hashkb 9y ago
  It also takes advantage of the fact that most people will assume they are referring to cancer.
• scott_s 9y ago
  > Given that there are numerous chemical additives in traditional chemical cigarettes that are known to cause health issues nicotine may not be the dominantly harmful component in cigarettes. Based on your above comment, it sounds like you think that they tested for nicotine specifically. They did not. From the press release: There are potentially hundreds of chemicals in e-cigarettes that could be contributing to DNA damage, Kadimisetty says. Rather than test for all of them, the UConn team targeted three known carcinogenic chemicals found in tobacco cigarettes. They then loaded their device’s microwells with specific enzymes that would convert those chemicals into metabolites. If these chemicals were in the sample, the test gave them a reading for genotoxicity. If the chemicals were not present, there would be no reaction. Based on that paragraph, and other sentences throughout the press release, my interpretation is that their findings are that e-cigarettes are potentially as harmful as cigarettes. Some of the comments in this thread make it sounds like the researchers showed that just the nicotine in e-cigarettes is as potentially harmful as just the nicotine in cigarettes, but that's not my reading.
  • droopyEyelids 9y ago
    The 'potentially' is a HUGE asterisk here, though. E-cigarette liquid, at it's base, has two chemicals: propylene glycol and nicotine. Anything other than that is a flavor additive, or a smoke volume additive (glycerine). PG and Glycerine are extensively studied and safe for human consumption, PG is actually used in nebulizer treatments for people with asthma. Furthermore, a proper e-cigarette doesn't cause a chemical change in the liquid- it's only a physical state change. That precludes the oxidation reactions that characterize tobacco smoking. So my skepticism is really tweaked by this article. Yes, someone could potentially add hundreds of flavoring chemicals. Definitely room for a problem there, so address that. The essential cigarette is only two to three chemicals.
    • tristanj 9y ago
      The makeup of e-cigarette vapor is different than the what's in the liquid. When vaping, the e-cigarette coil heats up to 300°C and breaks compounds in the liquid (such as propylene glycol) into new compounds such as propylene oxide, acetaldehyde, and formaldehyde. Researchers found that aerosols generated by e-cigarettes contain up to 31 compounds, some of which are known carcinogens. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.6b01741 http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.6b01741
• autokad 9y ago
  heart disease (not lung cancer) is the number one threat from smoking cigarettes. is that the type of dna damage that leads to heart disease? thats the question I'd like to know.
• Veratyr 9y ago
  > I don't like the way they've titled their research. The authors' title, as it appears in the journal the study was submitted to is "Automated 3-D Printed Arrays to Evaluate Genotoxic Chemistry: E-Cigarettes and Water Samples" (see http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acssensors.7b00118 http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acssensors.7b00118). The "E-cigarettes ‘Potentially as Harmful as Tobacco Cigarettes’" title comes from "UConn Today", a university news site. Just to be clear that the academics didn't choose this silly title.
• tinus_hn 9y ago
  Of course the cigarette companies are investing in the e-cigarette business, like Philip Morris with IQOS. Smoking is a dead end so they are looking for alternatives. Ultimately, like smoking, using e-cigarettes is smelly and unhealthy. Regulators aren't going to allow for them to be presented as harmless because they aren't and science isn't going to ignore the harmful effects because they do exist. The only reason e-cigarettes are not banned in all the places cigarettes are is because the rules are about burning tobacco and politics makes it difficult to change the rules.