What We Know About Electronic Cigarettes?
E-cigarettes usually contain nicotine and may have other harmful substances too. There’s a lot of conflicting information about them. We still have a lot to learn, but here’s what we currently know.
E-cigarettes have been taken up by millions around the world since they first appeared on the Chinese market in 2004. In 2016, 3.2 percent of adults in the United States were using them.
VAPEANDO is now the most popular form of tobacco use among teenagers in the U.S. E-cigarette use rose by 900 percent among high school students from 2011 to 2015.
In 2016, over 2 million middle and high school students had tried e-cigarettes. For those aged 18 to 24 years, 40 percent of vapers had not been smokers before using the device.
A growing body of research suggests that vaping may be hazardous.
While it may help existing smokers to give up, there is concern that young people are starting to vape for its own sake, and not to replace tobacco use.
In 2016, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) started to enforce rules about the sales, marketing, and production of these products.
However E-cigarette safety has been a subject of debate. Dr. Bailey's observational study, "SmokeFreeBrain," assessed the effect of heavy smokers switching from cigarettes to e-cigarettes for 28 days. The team measured several parameters including psychometric, cardiovascular, quality of life, brain activity and biomarkers of toxicity.
Findings from the 31 subjects who completed the study showed subtle but significant changes in psychometric parameters and a considerable reduction in biomarkers of toxicity. Switching from cigarettes to e-cigarettes reduced the craving to smoke and affected brain regions associated with addiction. Exposure to nicotine was also significantly reduced as well as tobacco specific nitrosamines, cigarette biomarkers of toxicity demonstrating prominent harm reduction following switching to e-cigarettes.
