To Vape Or Not To Vape?

Some claim they’re safer than smoking but studies suggest e-cigarettes may increase the risk of DNA damage and other health problems.

- Khatija Nxedlana

YOU’LL see them in cars, gathered outside office buildings and hanging around bars and nightclubs: people shrouded in clouds of aromatic “smoke”, pulling on hitech-looking devices a little thicker than a pencil.

They’re the growing band of smokers the world over who are taking to vaping, a much-hailed “safer” alternative to cigarettes and a pastime touted as an effective way to give up conventional smoking.

Yet new research might make vapers want to reconsider inhaling the stuff their e-cigarettes produce – because these devices could apparently lead to several scary diseases.

What the boffins found

Scientists at New York University (NYU) led by environmental professor Moon- Shong Tang exposed laboratory mice to electronic cigarette vapour for 12 weeks. The dose and duration of the nicotine exposure was the equivalent of 10 years of light e-cigarette smoking in humans.

Researchers found DNA damage in the hearts, lungs and bladders of mice exposed to the vapours. This damage wasn’t found in a control group of animals that breathed ordinary filtered air.

Natural DNA repair mechanisms were also found to be suppressed in the mice exposed to the smoke.

Nicotine inhaled from e-cigarettes could be converted into chemicals that damage DNA and slow down the body’s genetic repair mechanisms, Tang concluded.

He also found that exposing human lung and bladder cells to nicotine and its breakdown products made the cells turn into tumour tissue more easily.

Tang and his team concluded that although vaping delivers fewer carcinogens (substances that cause cancer) than tobacco smoke, e-cigarette smokers might have a higher risk of developing lung and bladder cancer as well as heart disease.

But then others say . . .