Positive News About Vaping
For those who are waiting for legislators to finally climb off the vaping industry’s
back, the news as 2017 drew to a close could be described as heartening.
The American Vaping Association (AVA), the nonprofit organization
that advocates for policies that encourage the
growth and sustainability of small- and medium-sized businesses
in the rapidly growing vaping and electronic cigarette
industry, pointed to a first-of-its-kind long-term study published
in the journal Nature.
The result: researchers had found no negative health impacts
from the daily use of electronic cigarettes by young
adult never-smokers.
“Researchers from the University of Catania, led by Dr. Riccardo
Polosa, tracked nine electronic cigarette users with no
history of smoking, as well as twelve lifetime non-smokers
and non-vapers, over the course of three and a half years,”
the association reported. The researchers found no impact
on a variety of health outcomes, including blood pressure,
heart rate, lung function, exhaled breath nitric oxide, exhaled
carbon monoxide, and CT scans of the lungs.
“In spite of previous health scares, our study shows for the first time no risk in long-term vapers who have never smoked in their life,” said Polosa, who presented the study at the fifth annual E-Cigarette Summit in the United Kingdom on Friday, November 17th.
Polosa, the group continued, noted that “while even longerterm
research is needed to rule out any possible negative
impacts, changes in spirometry and CT scans can be seen
in young smokers after approximately two years of cigarette
usage. With the vapers, no signs of lung damage, including
COPD, lipoid pneumonia, and popcorn lung, were found in
CT scans, even among the study participants with the highest
consumption of e-liquid.”
In the United States, far less than 1% of adult never-smokers
are current vapers, with an even smaller proportion reporting
vaping daily, according to the CDC’s 2015 National
Health Interview Survey. Despite this, much of the concern in the media and scientific circles revolve around fears of
the impact of vaping on nonsmokers.
“Mouse and cell studies may generate salacious headlines
about the supposed dangers of vaping, but they are no replacement
for studies on actual humans,” said Gregory Conley,
President and founder of the association. “If no negative
health impacts can be seen from daily vaping among those
who previously did not smoke, how is it ethical to continue
warning smokers away from using these products?”
6.6 MILLION LIVES
AVA also trumpeted another major study that found vaping
could save 6.6 million American smokers. As it noted in a release,
“In what could turn out to be a transformative moment
in the debate over vaping in America, a research team led
by investigators from Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive
Cancer Center is now estimating that vaping could save the
lives of up to 6.6 million U.S. smokers over the next 10 years.”
On the basis of this evidence, AVA continued, “the researchers
are recommending that public health organizations
adopt a strategy of encouraging smokers to switch to
vaping to hasten the decline of America’s smoking rate.”
Published in the journal Tobacco Control, the study is the first
to model the best- and worst-case outcomes of U.S. smokers
switching to vaping. In establishing their variables, the
researchers considered a range of factors, including differing
estimates on the relative harm of vapor products versus cigarettes,
as well as the impact of vaping on cessation, switching,
and initiation, including by nonusers.
“In the most pessimistic scenario tested by the researchers, a strategy of replacing cigarettes with vaping is calculated to save 1.6 million lives, or 160,000 lives per year.
“Even the gloomiest analysis shows a significant gain in years
of life if nicotine is obtained from vaping instead of much
more deadly amount of toxicants inhaled with cigarette
smoke,” said David Levy, a lead researcher and professor of
oncology at Georgetown Lombardi. “Old policies need to be
supplemented with policies that encourage substituting ecigarettes
for the far more deadly cigarettes.”
The study, which involved researchers from Georgetown University,
Yale University, the Roswell Park Cancer Institute,
and others, was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
In total, the researchers conclude that as many as 86.7 million
years of life could be gained by smokers who make the
switch during the ten-year period modeled in the study.
Association president Conley had this to say: “This study could
represent a seismic shift in the way the FDA and public health
groups look at vaping. For years, harm reduction advocates
have relied on quality research from independent European
researchers and non-government organizations, only to be
told that such research was somehow not trustworthy because
the authors were not American. Now, we have some of the
most respected American researchers in the field of tobacco
control explaining in detail how vaping can and will save lives.
“If there is a fault with this research, it is that it assumes
that a functional vaping market will still exist in a decade.
Unless FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb acts to reform
the FDA’s outdated tobacco regulatory system, over 99% of
vapor products could be banned in or before 2022. We are
hopeful that studies like this will give Gottlieb the confidence
he needs to truly modernize the way FDA regulates
smoke-free nicotine products.”