When a friend sitting at my kitchen table pulled out what
looked like a cigarette, I was about to direct her to the front porch. But then
I realized that what she was blowing was an odorless vapor, not smoke. It was
an electronic cigarette.
Electronic cigarettes come in a variety of shapes and
models, but most consist of a battery, a heating element, and a liquid that
contains nicotine, propylene glycol and flavorings. The heating element warms
and aerosolizes the liquid, turning it into a vapor the user inhales. Smoking
an e-cigarette (called “vaping”), gives users a nicotine hit without exposing
them, or those around them, to tobacco smoke. The lack of odor is one of the
biggest selling points, says Craig Weiss, chief executive of NJoy electronic
cigarettes.
Though e-cigarette makers do not make safety or health
claims, many users assume that eliminating the smoke of burning tobacco also
eliminates the harm. “There’s no question that e-cigarettes deliver fewer
[toxic substances] than conventional cigarettes, but the question of how much
less is still not clear,” says Stanton Glantz, director of the Center for
Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California at San
Francisco. Though sales of e-cigarettes are expected to reach $1 billion this
year, with many different brands available. vaping is new enough that there
haven’t been many studies done yet — certainly none of the large-scale,
randomized trials that would be necessary to offer conclusive answers about the
safety of e-cigarettes, Glantz says.
While there’s little doubt that electronic cigarettes expose
users to far fewer carcinogens and irritants than conventional cigarettes, the
ingredients found in the liquids can vary greatly from product to product, says
behavioral scientist Alexander Prokhorov at the University of Texas MD Anderson
Cancer Center. “The companies improvise to come up with new flavorings and
every time they introduce a new flavor, you don’t really know what’s in it,” he
says. An analysis by researchers at the FDA found very low levels of
nitrosamines, ethylene glycol and diethylene glycol — chemicals associated with
cancer and other health risks — in some electronic cigarette products, but the
levels were a tiny fraction of what a smoker would get from a tobacco
cigarette.
Unlike tobacco cigarettes, electronic cigarettes aren’t
currently subject to regulation in the United States, which means their
ingredients aren’t standardized. The FDA is working on a proposed rule to
regulate the devices, wrote agency spokesperson Jenny Haliski in a prepared
statement. Though the FDA did not provide a timeline for regulation, Glantz
suspects political pressure makes regulation unlikely to happen anytime soon.
For now, researchers are trying to get a handle on the risks
and benefits of e-cigarettes. “It’s a new product, and there’s still a lot we
don’t know,” says Pallav Pokhrel, a public health scientist at the University
of Hawaii Cancer Center. For instance, it’s unclear what effects electronic
cigarettes may have on smoking initiation among youth or cessation among
current smokers.
Some electronic cigarettes allow users to adjust the amount
of nicotine they’re getting, and even adjust it down to zero over time, and it
seems plausible that a device that lets people reduce the amount of
icotine they’re consuming could help them cut their
dependence, Prokhorov says. However, right now there aren’t good studies to
show that they outperform existing nicotine cessation products, nor are they
FDA-approved for this purpose.
Lauren Odum, a pharmacist at the University of Missouri at
Kansas City, recently published a review of the scientific literature on using
e-cigarettes to quit smoking. “We came up with a lot of anecdotal evidence from
patients saying that these are very helpful, but it’s mostly surveys and the
data is skewed, because people who have a positive experience are more likely
to report back,” she says. “The ones who weren’t able to quit smoking were
probably less likely to respond these surveys.”
Article Credit: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
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