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E-Cigarettes With Nicotine Increase Your Risk of Heart Disease, Says Study (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Even after puffing on just one electronic cigarette with nicotine, healthy non-smokers were found to have a biological marker known to increase the risk of heart disease in tobacco users, according to a new study. The research, published in Journal of the American Heart Association, shows that nicotine is not harmless, as many people believe. It can affect a smoker's health in more than one way, and not just by triggering addiction. Another study, conducted by Middlekauff that was published earlier this year, showed that people who use e-cigs almost every day have biological markers known to increase the risk of heart disease in tobacco users. These included an increase in adrenaline levels in the heart, which can predispose smokers to bad heart rhythms, heart attacks, and sudden death, as well as increased oxidative stress, an imbalance in the body's ability to defend itself against the damaging action of free radicals. Oxidative stress can lead to changes in blood fats and lead to arteriosclerosis.

That study, however, didn't show what exactly was causing those changes. E-cigarettes can have different flavoring and solvents, as well as nicotine. So to identify the culprit, Middlekauff brought 33 healthy non-smokers and non-vapers into the lab. On three different days, one month apart, the participants were asked to puff on three different kinds of e-cigarettes for 30 minutes: one with nicotine, one without nicotine, and a sham e-cig that was empty. The researchers did blood tests and measured the subjects' heart rhythms, and found that the participants had high levels of adrenaline in their hearts after they smoked the e-cig with nicotine, but not after they puffed on the e-cigarette without nicotine or the empty e-cig.

27 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Wow. Just WOW! by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 4, Insightful

    E-Cigarettes With Nicotine Increase Your Risk of Heart Disease

    I'm shocked! SHOCKED I TELL YOU!

    But I'll bet there's a hell of a lot less tar!

    --
    If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
    1. Re:Wow. Just WOW! by Luthair · · Score: 2

      Its just water vapor man, there is nothing in it!

    2. Re:Wow. Just WOW! by Pseudonym · · Score: 5, Funny

      Vape only homeopathic nicotine.

      --
      sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
    3. Re:Wow. Just WOW! by Tatarize · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The important bit is that when compared they should be compared with cigarettes not with nicotine-less ecigs or dummy e-cigs. And you will find that cigarettes kill 400k people a year. Whereas e-cigs will kill a couple people with heart attacks and stimulant linked deaths and maybe a doofus screwing up and overdosing through utter stupidity, but you will *never* get to 400k deaths in a year.

      Add to this the fact that this research will be used to attack e-cigs and this research will end up causing many thousands of deaths that otherwise would have been prevented. Any valid determination should find e-cigs are on par with vaccines and clean water. They are gutting traditional tobacco products to the life saving result of what is going to be millions of people in short order.

      --

      It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
    4. Re:Wow. Just WOW! by Hognoxious · · Score: 2

      thrown up a smoke screen

      I can just about make out what you did there.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    5. Re:Wow. Just WOW! by coastwalker · · Score: 4, Informative

      Are the odds 100% that this "study" was funded by tobacco money? Do 40k Americans die in road traffic accidents every year but we never discuss them because there are no angles for profitable corporations? Does vaping save the lives of up to 400k people a year? Actually I think there is a good case for locking up the people doing the study for manslaughter.

      --
      Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
    6. Re:Wow. Just WOW! by sjames · · Score: 2

      What is your justification for prescription only? Nicotine has been used over the counter for centuries with few if any acute deaths or injuries. e-cigs are showing that same pattern. Prescription only is supposed to be for things that cannot be used safely without a doctor's supervision.

      It has been hyped as being as benign as coffee.

      Some people advocate drinking your own urine too, what's your point? Urine as a controlled substance?

    7. Re:Wow. Just WOW! by azrael29a · · Score: 2

      Its just water vapor man, there is nothing in it!

      There's much more than water vapour in the e-cigarettes' output: glycerine, propylene glycol. Bon appetit.

    8. Re:Wow. Just WOW! by stealth_finger · · Score: 2

      Its just water vapor man, there is nothing in it!

      There's much more than water vapour in the e-cigarettes' output: glycerine, propylene glycol. Bon appetit.

      It really is the DHMO you have to watch out for. That stuff'll fuck you up, especially if too much gets in your lungs at once!

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    9. Re:Wow. Just WOW! by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 2

      Possibly, but not for the reasons you think.

      Tobacco companies don't want to harm ecigarettes because they cut into their profit. They produce ecigarettes and want to ladle on expensive regulations so only they can afford to produce them, and take the profits themselves.

      Don't you NPR very much?

      --
      (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
    10. Re:Wow. Just WOW! by drakaan · · Score: 2

      But, isn't the main purpose of vapes to provide a less-unhealthy way to deliver nicotine to addicts? Why are you making this argument, again? Your argument is proceeding from a premise that has not yet been clearly described.

      --
      "Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
    11. Re:Wow. Just WOW! by king+neckbeard · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Look, anybody who isn't completely in the dark knows that nicotine is bad for one's overall health (it is a naturally occurring pesticide, after all). We don't really need studies to know that.

      In practice, e-cigs are a cigarette replacement, hence the name. Comparing them to cigarettes is thus the most important benchmark for serious inquiry about their health effects.

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    12. Re:Wow. Just WOW! by Rashkae · · Score: 2

      Your comparison is apt. What does this study show? Increased adrenaline possibly leading to abnormal heart rhythms? symptoms remarkably similar to caffeine, (and probably any other chemical stimulant.) Benign as coffee is about all this research has shown. We already new nicotine was a stimulant.

    13. Re: Wow. Just WOW! by sound+vision · · Score: 3, Insightful

      People aren't going to drink battery acid in lieu of water. Comparing nicotine vapor to cigarettes is 100% relevant. We *already have* millions of nicotine addicts and if there is a way to reduce the health risks by even a few percentage points, that needs to be investigated. Should have started decades ago, honestly.

    14. Re:Wow. Just WOW! by war4peace · · Score: 2

      They produce shitty ecigarettes

      FTFY.

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    15. Re:Wow. Just WOW! by Tatarize · · Score: 3, Informative

      No. While a lot of people do switch to e-cigs then down their nicotine to zero. I'm pretty sure that the health benefits accrue when one switches to e-cigs. The tobacco products kill because of the tars in them that cause cancer and most of the other health effects. Those are eliminated and you are left with a powerful stimulant.

      The requisite comparison to smoking is because people are very typically swapping smoking for vaping. And to determine the ill-effects you need to take that into effect. There's likely some people who might take up vaping directly, who might not have taken up smoking. And the stimulants might be able to unilaterally lead to their deaths, especially if they have an underlying heart or lung defect. And those deaths would be entirely the result of vaping. The problem though is you need to take into account the lives saved by the exceptionally common happening of people giving up smoking in order to vape, and even without attenuating any nicotine, get much much healthier in very short order and can run marathons.

      There might be additional health benefits to attenuating the nicotine to zero and quitting vaping too, but they pale in comparison to swapping smoking for vaping. The deadly cancer causing tars are not habit forming, in themselves, and can be completely mitigated this way. While I'm not at all convinced it's as benign as coffee, if people took up drinking coffee because it entirely replaced alcoholism and opioid addiction, I couldn't see any moral stance other than welcoming it as a savior. And if we suppose it might be worse for you than coffee, that's okay because alcoholism and opioid addiction combined don't kill as many people as smoking does.

      There's not enough research to say how benign it is, but we can say it's more benign than smoking. And that makes vaping a certifiable lifesaver; which is why it must be compared to traditional smoking.

      --

      It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
    16. Re:Wow. Just WOW! by Tranzistors · · Score: 2

      nicotine occurs naturally in tomatoes and peppers and other members of the Solanaceae flowering plant family

      Public service announcement: don't eat random plants from Solanaceae family, some of them are deadly. As for the tomatoes, potatoes and such, do not eat the green bits.

  2. Newsflash by viperidaenz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Consuming a stimulant causes stimulant effects.

  3. A biological marker by hey! · · Score: 4, Insightful

    is an indicator of a state or situation. For example c-reactive protein (one of the substances mentioned in the paper) is a marker of inflammation. It's actual function is to signal the immune system to clear out dead cells (both our own and bacterial).

    Ischemic heart disease is an inflammatory disease; therefore if you are developing ischemic heart disease, you will find high levels of inflammatory markers like C-reactive protein.

    However it seems to me it's a bit of a logical leap to do something which transiently increases inflammatory markers and then assume that means the subject's chances of getting a specific inflammatory disease are increased. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the paper.

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  4. Markers eh? by sjames · · Score: 4, Insightful

    One of the markers was increased adrenaline. As in the stuff that helps athletes perform their best. So no ecigs, no exercise, got it.

    But as for the rest, some people who would otherwise keep smoking will use ecigs instead. Some who would start smoking will use ecigs instead. That's bad how?

    As for helping you quit, ecigs helped me quit. After a number of years vaping, I found that I just wasn't interested in the nicotine anymore. No drama, no nail biting, no eating the entire refrigerator, nothing. Just no more interest in nicotine.

    That's the part that really hacks them off, I sinned by smoking and they want to see some serious suffering as penance.

    1. Re:Markers eh? by BlueStrat · · Score: 4, Interesting

      That's the part that really hacks them off, I sinned by smoking and they want to see some serious suffering as penance.

      A former smoker thanks to vaping here as well.

      Not only that, but it hurts the bottom-lines of Big Tobacco and the healthcare industry, and thus the amount of money politicians receive from BT's & HCI's PACs and lobbyists, as well as reducing State and Federal tobacco-tax receipts.

      Culturally it also reduces the number of people that it's socially-acceptable to discriminate against, harass, shame, threaten, intimidate, segregate, and generally persecute.

      "The Spice^W^W^W^W^WTobacco must flow!"

      These are simply the tobacco and healthcare "Guild Navigators'" representatives telling the politicians that they'll live out their days in a pain-amplifier if the flow is threatened, and those politician's attempts to send in the cultural Harkonnens and Imperial Sardaukar.

      Strat

      --
      Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
    2. Re:Markers eh? by Shemmie · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Another former smoker. 20 a day.

      I now vape with nicotine.

      I believe vaping to be worse than "nothing at all". We're ingesting chemicals in ways that aren't exactly natural. But I also believe it's orders of magnitude "better" than smoking. I hope there's more research done into nicotine, as I believe it's also been linked with neurological benefits; there's clearly a great deal we still don't know about the drug. I expect some of it to be good, and some of it to be bad, simply because nicotine has been used for a relatively long time now - and while we've established issues with the way people consume the drug (producing tar), the drug itself seems to have been harder to nail down.

      Personally, as a complete layman, I do believe there's a link between inflammation and nicotine. There is some kind of link between my psoriasis (inflammation), nicotine, obesity and cardiovascular disease. Some of it we know; some of it we're still piecing together. Psoriasis has been linked with inflammatory heart disease https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/news... , obesity is obviously linked with heart disease - there's talk about smoking (or nicotine, the research seems to be a WIP here) impacting psoriasis https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

      As for the cause and effect; who knows? That's why this research is important, imho. But as others have warned - it needs cool heads. There 'are' sections determined to treat nicotine as a holy war. I can understand that; I've lost two family members to smoking related illnesses, with a third at the chronic stage of her illness.

      But if vaping helps smokers, and improves their health (relative to smoking) - great. It expect it has its own complications - but I remain confident, at this point, that there are less complications than from smoking.

  5. "duh" by markdavis · · Score: 5, Insightful

    >" Middlekauff brought 33 healthy non-smokers and non-vapers into the lab. On three different days, one month apart, the participants [...] and found that the participants had high levels of adrenaline in their hearts after they smoked the e-cig with nicotine"

    Seriously? This is supposed to be impressive, useful science or something? So people who don't use nicotine consumed it and had typical, known, short-term heart rate changes after using that stimulant? And since none had any tolerance, the reaction was probably strong, right?

    Now repeat that experiment with people who don't use caffeine and have them consume that stimulant instead and measure heart rates and heart adrenaline levels. Wow, what a coincidence!

  6. So just nicotine research then by Titanek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why the broadside to vaping? Surely this study extends to nicotine gum, nicotine patches, and nicotine sprays as well.

  7. Anti ecig people are stupid by rossz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Compare ecigs to tobacco when looking at the health issue since the overwhelming majority of ecig users are former smokers.

    The anti-smoking people are becoming irrelevant, which worries them. So they chose ecigs as their new target. There is a push to ban ecigs in all places that tobacco smoking is banned. That would include my own apartment where smoking is banned on the entire property. If this stupid law gets passed, I'll have to walk outside and off the property to the street to vape. I might as well light up a real cigarette if I'm going through that much trouble.

    "It's the smell!" It's odorless, you moron, unless I get a flavored kind, then it will smell like vanilla or berries. That shit you cooked for dinner last night for dinner was far more offensive.

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    -- Will program for bandwidth
    1. Re:Anti ecig people are stupid by itsdapead · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Compare ecigs to tobacco when looking at the health issue since the overwhelming majority of ecig users are former smokers.

      At the moment.

      The trouble is, two different questions are getting conflated here: (1) Are e-cigs safe? and (2) Are e-cigs safer than tobacco? The latter is pretty much a no brainer - and e-cigs are clearly great for people trying to quit smoking.

      However, claims for safety in absolute terms seem to rely a lot on an "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" mentality. If e-cigs are touted as "harmless fun" rather than "a good way to quit" then, increasingly, non-smokers and, ex-smokers who have successfully quit are going to take it up, and existing vapers are going to vape more freely than they used to smoke. In 20 years time we'll find what continually inhaling glycol and assorted flavourings does to lungs, let alone what ever-increasing doses of nicotine does to you if lung cancer doesn't get you first.

      That shit you cooked for dinner last night for dinner was far more offensive.

      Yes, well, the increasing number of people who turn up to work with tupperware containers full of stinky food that they proceed to microwave in the office kitchen (previously reserved for cups of tea and the occasional celebratory cake) until the whole corridor is filled with the miasma from 57 varieties of re-heated leftovers are on my shit list too :-)

      BTW - what do you think happens to all that glycol, glycerine and flavouring (which you might not use but plenty of other vapers do) after you breathe it out in a confined space (esp. in a bar with 30 other people doing the same)? The fact that the "smoke" disappears rapidly just means that the droplets have got too small to see. When you're banned from smoking in your own, freehold, detached, single-occupancy house, then maybe I'll side with you - in the meantime, if you want to vaporize chemicals, fuck off outside where others don't have to breathe the results. If you're addicted to nicotine you'll rationalise any sort of antisocial behaviour to satisfy your craving, which is why we need laws.

      --
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  8. You are embarrassingly wrong. by Tatarize · · Score: 2

    You are just wrong. It is categorically the fact that countries with single payer health care systems have done exactly that study suggested and found that they would get massive health benefits and health care cost reductions, and found absolutely that E-cigarettes are "95% less toxic". You then attribute this not existing, regardless of that fact that it totally does exist, to lobbying etc, which is moot because, you're wrong.

    https://www.nhs.uk/news/heart-...
    NHS is the national health service in the UK. This study was from two years ago.

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