Category: Research

Study Claims Vapes, Marijuana Harmful to Heart

Researchers found evidence that e-cigarettes and marijuana have harmful effects on the heart that are similar to negative effects from traditional tobacco cigarettes, according to a new study from University of California San Francisco (UCSF).
Health effects from vapes, marijuana joints, and cigarettes all “open the door to abnormal heart rhythms,” according to the study published Tuesday in the journal Heart Rhythm.
“We found that cigarettes, e-cigarettes, and marijuana greatly interfere with the electrical activity, structure, and neural regulation of the heart,” lead author Dr. Huiliang Qiu, a postdoctoral scholar in the UCSF Division of Cardiology, said in a press release. “Often, any single change can lead to arrhythmia disease. Unfortunately, these adverse effects on the heart are quite comprehensive.”
To work well, researchers explained that the heart must pump blood efficiently and with the correct timing. This vital organ is equipped with its own electrical control system thanks to our nerves, according to The Hill.
If any part of the heart doesn’t handle those electrical signals properly, it can cause other regions of the organ to act asynchronously, meaning they will fight against each other rather than functioning as a single efficient pump.
This can lead to arrhythmias that can be life-threatening, according to researchers.
The study was funded by the California Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program, the American Heart Association, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Tobacco Products, the National Institutes of Heart, and other partners.
November 16, 2022
CDC: Teen Tobacco use Down Over 50% From 2019

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The numbers are in and teen tobacco use is dropping. According to government data released last week, an estimated 3.08 million U.S. middle and high school students reported using a tobacco product in the last 30 days in 2022. That figure is down from 4.47 million in 2020 and 6.20 million in 2019.
E-cigarettes were the most commonly used tobacco product among teens for the ninth consecutive year, according to the study published in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
The survey found cigars to be second most popular with 500,000 reporting use, followed by 440,000 cigarette smokers.
Nearly 31 percent of the students surveyed reported using multiple products, which the CDC called “particularly concerning” as that has been linked to nicotine dependence and sustained use in adulthood, according to Reuters.
Cigarette smoking among U.S. youths has been steadily declining in the last two decades, although the CDC cautioned against comparing the results to previous years due to a change in the method of data collection related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The study was based on an annual national survey that took place from January to May this year, which showed that nearly 11.3 percent of all students had used a tobacco product in the last 30 days.
November 14, 2022
Study Shows That Duel Use is Better Than Smoking

A new study published in the scientific journal, Addiction shows that people who both smoke combustible cigarettes and vape while trying to quit cigarettes have lower levels of toxic chemicals in their bodies.
The study looked at the biomarkers of almost 1,300 people who are either smokers, vapers, or both smokers and vapers, known as dual-users. The researchers found that dual-users had less prevalence of toxic chemicals like carbon monoxide in their bodies than people who only smoked.
The new research discredits the previously-held belief that using vaping as a quit-smoking method only led to more smoking and ingestion of more harmful chemicals from both cigarettes and e-cigarettes.
Many studies from the past decade have consistently shown that e-cigarette users often engage in dual use, meaning they continue to smoke while vaping.
This has been the case in the U.S., the UK, and the EU. For example, smokers in the U.S. reported a consistent level of e-cigarette use in three consecutive years ranging from 29.8 percent in 2015 to 27.7 percent in 2018.
The same has been reported in the UK. One study found that dual-use was higher in adolescents who only used e-cigarettes, even though the largest group in the survey was e-cigarette-only users, according to Vaping Daily.
It also showed that young people who began smoking cigarettes first continued to smoke even if they took up vaping.
November 8, 2022
VTA Skeptical of FDA’s Latest Youth Vaping Analysis

After the U.S. Food and Drug Administration released its latest National Youth Tobacco Survey, Vapor Technology Association (VTA) Executive Director Tony Abboud said the FDA’s reporting of the data is misleading.
“Yesterday, the FDA, in coordination with the [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ], released new data from the 2022 National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS) on e-cigarette use among U.S. youth,” Abboud stated. “The FDA represents the NYTS data to show that youth vaping ‘remains high,’ yet a deeper dive into the data show only a small uptick in experimental or infrequent use while regular use remains flat or is slightly down.
Abboud notes that since 2019, according to the CDC, the number of high school students who have tried vaping (1 time in the last 30 days) has dropped by 50 percent, and the number of middle school students has plummeted by 70 percent. During that same time period, the number of high-school students who ‘frequently’ vape dropped by 37 percent and the number of middle school students dropped by 65 percent.
” FDA’s near single-minded focus on youth who experiment with vaping versus those who are frequent users ignores what clearly is a consistent trend of youth away from vaping products. Rather than focusing on removing products from the market in an attempt to impact youth vaping, the FDA should instead support common-sense regulatory reforms that would better restrict access to products instead,” Abboud stated. “Simply removing products from the market is not the answer when those products are also proven to help adult smokers quit.”
Abboud explained that it is well documented that flavored vapor products help adult smokers to switch to less harmful vaping and “study after study after study” has confirmed the data. Since 2010, when e-cigarettes became widely available in the U.S., smoking rates have declined by more than half, he stated.
“Tobacco use is down. Youth vaping is down. These are both good things and are not in dispute. Unfortunately, there are still 40 million Americans addicted to cigarettes,” Abboud stated. “Every year, 500,000 die from smoking-related diseases and yet less than three percent of our kids are using vapes on a regular basis. The FDA’s failure to acknowledge this reality ignores the role vaping plays in harm reduction and smoking cessation, and puts more lives at risk.”
October 9, 2022
Several Studies Refute Link Between Vaping, Smoking

An anti-smoking group announced that several studies have found no evidence that the use of e-cigarettes and heated tobacco products (HTPs) are leading non-smokers and youth towards cobustible cigarette smoking in countries such as the U.S., the UK, Australia, Japan, France and Switzerland.
Action on Smoking and Health (ASH)-UK cited the results of five large surveys of 11 to 16-year-olds in the UK between 2015 and 2017 showing that “most young people who experiment with e-cigarettes did not become regular users,” according to media reports.
“Overall, there is no evidence that e-cigarettes have driven up smoking prevalence in this age group. In fact, smoking prevalence among young people has declined since e-cigarettes came onto the market,” ASH-UK stated.
A time-series analysis conducted by researchers led by Emma Beard between 2007 and 2018 in the UK showed that the increase in the prevalence of e-cigarette use in England among the entire sample does not appear to have been associated with an increase in the uptake of smoking among young adults aged 16 to 24.
A 2022 study by University of Bristol researchers found that, based on the “current balance of evidence, using triangulated data from recent population-level cross-contextual comparisons, individual-level genetic analyses and modeling, we do believe, however, that causal claims about a strong gateway effect from e-cigarettes to smoking are unlikely to hold, while it remains too early to preclude other smaller or opposing effects.”
A 2020 study by Dr. Colin Mendelsohn and Wayne Hall concluded that claims of vaping serving as a gateway to smoking are unconvincing. “Smoking more often precedes vaping than vice versa, regular vaping by never-smokers is rare and the association is more plausibly explained by a common liability model,” they stated.
Another comprehensive analysis of whether vaping causes smoking uptake was published by the University of Queensland in Australia. That study concluded also that there was little evidence of a gateway effect. If a gateway effect does exist, it is likely to be small, the study said.
A 2021 study by Wayne Hall and Gary Chan on the “gateway” effect of e-cigarettes found that “e-cigarette use has not been accompanied by increased cigarette smoking among young people in the United States, as would be the case if e-cigarette use were a major gateway to cigarette smoking.”
September 17, 2022
Teens Influenced by Parent’s Vaping, Smoking Habits

Credit: Aleksandr Yu
Parents who vape of smoke are 55 percent more likely to have teenagers who will pick up the habit, according to research presented at the European Respiratory Society International Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
The researchers have also found that the proportion who have tried e-cigarettes has been increasing dramatically and that although boys are more likely to use e-cigarettes, the rate of use among girls is increasing more rapidly, according to the study of Irish teens, according to media reports.
The research was carried out by a team at the Tobacco-Free Research Institute Ireland (TFRI), in Dublin. The group examined data on 6,216 17-18-year-olds, including data on whether their parents smoked while they were growing up. The teenagers were asked whether they smoked or used e-cigarettes.
The study showed that teenagers whose parents smoked were around 55 percent more likely to have tried e-cigarettes and around 51 percent more likely to have tried smoking.
The team also combined several Irish data sets to provide the most comprehensive analyses of teenage e-cigarette use in Ireland, with information on more than 10,000 Irish teenagers (aged 16 to 17), to look at the overall numbers of teenagers trying or regularly using e-cigarettes and how this is changing over time.
This showed that the proportion who had tried e-cigarettes had increased from 23 percent in 2014 to 39 percent in 2019.
The main reasons teenagers gave for trying e-cigarettes were curiosity (66 percent) and because their friends were vaping (29 percent). Only 3 percent said it was to quit smoking.
The proportion who said they had never used tobacco when they first tried e-cigarettes increased from 32 percent in 2015 to 68 percent in 2019.
September 6, 2022
FTC Report Shows Surge in Sales of Disposable Vapes
Credit: Andriy Blokhin
The Federal Trade Commission’s second report on e-cigarette sales and advertising across the U.S. shows sales of flavored disposable e-cigarettes and menthol e-cigarette cartridges surging dramatically in 2020.
The coincides with a federal ban on the flavored cartridges for closed systems. Regulators state that closed systems were popular with youth, so the FTC report suggests that youth e-cigarette use has shifted to disposable flavored products rather than declined.
The report also found that the distribution of free and discounted e-cigarettes reached record highs.
“This report shows that youth are still at risk from flavored or deeply discounted e-cigarettes,” said Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “Marketers of e-cigarettes have proven skillful at evading FDA regulation and hooking youth on addictive products.”
The FTC has been reporting on tobacco sales annually since 1967 and smokeless tobacco sales since 1987. Last year, the agency expanded its studies of industry and published its first-ever report on e-cigarettes.
This year’s e-cigarette report covers sales and advertising data from 2019 and 2020, a period in which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration published an enforcement policy banning the sale of flavored e-cigarette cartridges other than menthol.
Overall, the report found that total e-cigarette sales, which had increased from $304.2 million in 2015 to $2.046 billion in 2018, grew to $2.703 billion in 2019, but then declined to $2.24 billion in 2020. The FTC report notes that the 2020 decline may not represent the market given major industry shifts. Key findings in the report include:
Significant shift to flavored disposable e-cigarettes: Publicly available sources indicate that the sale of disposable e-cigarettes – which are exempt from the FDA’s 2020 policy – increased substantially, with “other” flavored disposable products making up 77.6 percent of all disposables sold in December 2020. The FTC’s data did not show an increase in disposable sales. However, FTC’s data likely does not represent an accurate picture of the market for disposable e-cigarettes. Only two of the five companies submitting data for 2019-20 continued to market disposable e-cigarettes in 2020, and those that did provided more limited offerings. In order to improve the representativeness of its industry sales data for future FTC reports, the FTC recently sent orders to four additional e-cigarette companies.
Major increase in menthol cartridge sales: Similarly, the report found that the sale of the remaining non-FDA-banned flavored cartridge, menthol, increased significantly, to 63.5 percent of all cartridges sold in 2020.
Record high e-cigarette discounting: The data also reveal that price discounting for e-cigarettes reached a record high of $182.3 million in 2019, and, although it decreased slightly in 2020, such discounting still represented the largest category of ad expenditures by e-cigarette manufacturers.
Doubling of nearly free e-cigarette samples: The data collected for 2019-20 suggest that spending on the sampling and distribution of free and deeply price-discounted e-cigarettes more than doubled in just two years, making it the second-largest spending category in 2020. This occurred because, after the FDA banned tobacco product sampling in 2016 to limit youth access, some companies began offering e-cigarettes for $1 (or even less) in an apparent attempt to get around the ban.
“This report shows that partial bans on certain types of flavors for certain types of e-cigarettes are unlikely to be successful in achieving a reduction in youth addiction to nicotine via e-cigarette usage,” the FTC wrote in statement.
The Commission vote approving the FTC’s E-Cigarette Report and related data tables for 2019-20 was 5-0.
August 31, 2022
Record Levels of Vaping Reported in Great Britain

Credit: IR Stone
A new report from Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) has found that vaping has reached record levels in Great Britain with an estimated 4.3 million people being active vapers.
The data, shared exclusively with the PA news agency, suggests that 8.3 percent of adults in England, Wales and Scotland vape, according to the Glasgow Evening Times.
Ten years ago the number was 1.7 percent (an estimated 800,000 people).
ASH stated that a “vaping revolution” has taken place over the last decade. Of the 4.3 million current vapers, around 2.4 million are ex-smokers, 1.5 million are current smokers and 350,000 have never smoked a cigarette, according to the report.
The figures also show that the proportion of current e-cigarette users who have never smoked has increased from 4.9 percent last year to 8.1 percent this year. In 2022, 35 percent of current vapers also smoked, according to the report.
The report, based on a YouGov survey of more than 13,000 adults from across Great Britain, found that 28 percent of current smokers had never tried an e-cigarette, with 10 percent of this group saying they were “concerned e-cigarettes are not safe enough.”
A third of adults said they believe that vaping is more, or equally as harmful, as smoking. One in five former smokers said they used a vape to help them quit. However, more than half (56 percent) of current vapers who are ex-smokers said they had been vaping for more than three years.
Vapers reported that the main reason they used e-cigarettes were for quitting smoking, to prevent them from returning to smoking and 14 percent said they used vapes “because they enjoy it.”
Most vapers reported using refillable tank systems but the report points to a rise in disposable e-cigarettes – up from 2.3 percent of vapers using these in 2021 to 15 percent this year. The authors suggested that younger adults are driving the increase in the disposable vapes, with 48 percent of 18 to 24-year-old vapers use a disposable device.
“Over the last decade we’ve seen a vaping revolution take hold,” said Hazel Cheeseman, deputy chief executive of ASH. “There are now five times as many vapers as there were in 2012, with millions having used them as part of a quit attempt.
“However, they haven’t worked for everyone. Just under half of smokers who have tried them have stopped using them and 28 percent have never tried one at all. Government has said that a ‘vaping revolution’ will help them meet their ambition for a smoke-free country by 2030 but it won’t be enough – we need a comprehensive plan that will help all smokers.”
Earlier this year a separate report from ASH concluded that the proportion of children vaping is on the rise, with many being influenced by social media sites such as TikTok. While it is illegal to sell vapes to under-18s, the proportion of children aged 11 to 17 currently vaping has jumped from 4 percent in 2020 to 7 percent in 2022.
Ash started its annual survey, Smokefree GB, in 2010.
August 29, 2022
Univ. of Hawaii Gets $2.3 Million Grant to Study Vapes

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A $2.8-million grant to develop and evaluate a school-based, culturally-grounded e-cigarette prevention intervention for Hawaii’s rural youth has been awarded to University of Hawaii Cancer Center researcher, Scott Okamoto.
Funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the project builds on Hoʻouna Pono, a drug prevention curriculum designed for rural Hawaiian adolescents, according to the university.
The e-cigarette intervention plan will update the existing Hoʻouna Pono curriculum and introduce new e-cigarette and vaping prevention content, including a social and print media campaign across middle/intermediate and multi-level public and public-charter schools on Hawaii Island.
More than 500 students are anticipated to enroll in the study over five years.
“To our knowledge, this is the first study to develop and test an e-cigarette prevention intervention tailored to rural Hawaiian youth,” Okamoto said. “Our proposed intervention will educate youth on the risks of e-cigarette use, while also reflecting the cultural and relational values of rural Hawaiian youth and communities.”
August 27, 2022
Study: Vapes Reduce Heart Risks Compared to Smokes

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A new study shows that aerosols from nicotine vaping do not produce the cellular effects caused by cigarette smoke that lead to vascular damage and the onset of a host of heart diseases.
The research, published in Wiley Analytical Science, also found that aerosols from heated tobacco products produced substantially fewer adverse cellular effects compared to combustible cigarettes.
The study is part of the Replica Project, whose mission is to replicate the most well-known studies conducted by tobacco companies in order to independently assess their scientific validity.
The project is run by the Center of Excellence for the Acceleration of Harm Reduction (CoEHAR), according to Helen Redmond, writing for Filter.
The new study was conducted by an international group of researchers affiliated with CoEHAR at independent laboratories in Indonesia, Oman, Russia, Serbia, Greece and the U.S.
The researchers replicated a study done in 2017 by scientists BAT, which demonstrated that the endothelial cell migration inhibition caused by cigarette smoke (the endothelium is a membrane lining the heart and blood vessels) is not caused by e-cig aerosol exposure.
The Replica study, using the Vype ePen3 and the heated tobacco products Glo Pro and IQOS 3 Duo, corroborated the findings of the BAT study.
August 13, 2022