KnowScience: Are e-cigarettes harmless?

Are e-cigarettes harmless?

E-cigarettes, this unknown.

Using our Ask the Expert form, Matthew Guidetti asked KNow Science about e-cigarettes.

Are they healthy or not?

Are they worse or better than normal cigarettes?

What are their side effects?

Astonishingly, scientists have published more than 300 scientific papers on e-cigarettes since 2009. Probably right after the first e-cigarette set foot on the market, when it was just a niche habit or an alternative to cigarettes for the elite, scientists all over the globe were already busy experimenting with e-cigarettesⁱ. Data ranges from their modes of action, how routes of administration change their effects and whether they are ultimately safer than conventional cigarettes.

Why has all this science not reached the public? Why are people still uncertain about e-cigarettes when we [scientists[ know so much?

kNow-Science put two of our scientists, cancer expert Dr. Simona Giunta and brain biologist Dr. Ilaria Ceglia on the task of extracting comprehensible information from the jungle of published data.

So, what's the consensus?

Here are three main conclusions. Some are predictable, others definitely worth knowing!

1 – E-cigarettes are a great way to stop smoking.

2 – E-cigarettes are dangerous in a different way to normal cigarettes. While tarmac and other toxic substances are gone, the metal mechanisms in many e-cigarettes produced upon vaporization have been shown to release heavy metals, which you inhale with each puff ^1-2. A much better choice is all-ceramic e-cigarettes, which do not contain metallic parts, and hence have less risk of releasing heavy metals.

3 – E-cigarettes still have all the side effects of nicotine use. Changes to heart rate and blood pressure and propensity to cause lung cancer are still there ^3-4. Ingesting large quantities of nicotine, whichever the route, is not advisable from a health perspective.

The benefit of e-cigarettes over conventional cigarettes is that they can facilitate smoking cessation ^5-6.

Lung cancer is the number one killer cancer in the world for both men and women. It accounts for 13% of all new cancers, and a recent, extremely well controlled study showed convincingly that about 90% of lung cancers are due to smoking. [i]ⁱ

Doing the simple math, this means that if the all the smokers quit tomorrow the incidence of cancers overall would decrease by over 10%.

Now that you know the [scientific] truth about e-cigarettes, will you embrace the [scientific] truth about health and change your life accordingly?

Thanks for reading from the kNow-Science team.