Yesterday I see an article on the news a piece about vaping being as bad for the heart as smoking. Unsurprisingly it was an American experiment and probably funded by a pharmaceutical company who want to sell their 4% success rate nicotine replacement therapies.
This was the study they produced;
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/968890#.Y1o9DlpFcRc.twitter
“In the rat study, arterial flow…was measured pre- and post-exposure to smoke from four kinds of traditional combustible cigarettes.”
Now let’s compare that with what the British Heart Foundation says;
What does the British Heart Foundation say about vaping?
The BHF would not advise non-smokers to start vaping.
A study from the University of Dundee, published in November 2019 and funded by the British Heart Foundation, suggests that vaping may be less harmful to your blood vessels than smoking cigarettes. Within just one month of switching tobacco for electronic cigarettes, measures of blood vessel health, including blood pressure and stiffness of their arteries, had started to improve. The study looked at 114 people who had smoked at least 15 cigarettes a day for at least two years. This is a relatively small number of people, and the study does not prove that vaping is completely safe.
Professor Jeremy Pearson, Associate Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation, said: “This study suggests that vaping may be less harmful to your blood vessels than smoking cigarettes. Within just one month of ditching tobacco for electronic cigarettes, people’s blood vessel health had started to recover.
The BHF would not advise non-smokers to start vaping.
A study from the University of Dundee, published in November 2019 and funded by the British Heart Foundation, suggests that vaping may be less harmful to your blood vessels than smoking cigarettes. Within just one month of switching tobacco for electronic cigarettes, measures of blood vessel health, including blood pressure and stiffness of their arteries, had started to improve. The study looked at 114 people who had smoked at least 15 cigarettes a day for at least two years. This is a relatively small number of people, and the study does not prove that vaping is completely safe.
https://www.dundee.ac.uk/stories/vaping-less-harmful-smoking-vascular-health#:~:text=Cigarette%20smokers%20who%20switch%20to,of%20Dundee%20study%20has%20concluded.
Professor Jeremy Pearson, Associate Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation, said: “This study suggests that vaping may be less harmful to your blood vessels than smoking cigarettes. Within just one month of ditching tobacco for electronic cigarettes, people’s blood vessel health had started to recover.
“Just because e-cigarettes may be less harmful than tobacco doesn’t mean they are completely safe. We know they contain significantly fewer of the harmful chemicals, which can cause diseases related to smoking, but we still don’t know the long-term impact on the heart and circulation, or other aspects of health. E-cigarettes and vaping should never be taken up by people who don’t already smoke, but could be a useful tool to help people to stop smoking completely.
“Stopping smoking is the single best thing you can do for your heart health. If you’re looking to quit smoking, don’t go it alone. There is a range of free support available, including local stop smoking services, which will help you to find the best way of quitting and boost your chances of success.”
Stopping smoking and vaping (Tobacco Harm Reduction) Campaign for Safer Nicotine.
Smoking-related diseases account for around 100,000 deaths each year in the UK. Most of these deaths arise from one of three diseases: lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and coronary heart disease.
According to a 2019 YouGov survey, more than 3.6 million adults in Great Britain use e-cigarettes – 7.1 per cent of the adult population. Of these users, 54 per cent are ex-smokers, suggesting they are helping people to stop smoking.
Martin Dockrell, Tobacco Control Programme Lead at Public Health England, said: “People might be surprised at how much easier it is to quit with an electronic cigarette. Any smoker with a heart condition has almost certainly tried to quit in the past, and failed. Try again with an electronic cigarette because you might find that’s a lot easier. And further down the line, you might want to quit the e-cigarette as well.”
Mr Dockrell added: “We know that e-cigarettes are probably not completely safe, but that’s not the issue. The question is, are e-cigarettes safer than the alternative? It’s really important that smokers understand how much safer e-cigarettes are, compared to smoking”.
Marketing and the law around vaping
Experts agree that we need longer-term data on the effects of using e-cigarettes, particularly in regard to cardiovascular disease. But since e-cigarettes have only been on sale in the UK since 2007, long-term studies don’t yet exist. So e-cigarettes must be responsibly marketed and regulated to ensure appropriate use.
Linda Bauld, Professor of Health Policy at the University of Stirling, said “People have called for removing all marketing completely. I don’t think they should be sold in plain packaging and I don’t think they should be taxed like tobacco – vaping should be less expensive than smoking cigarettes. And we’d tell people to only use e-cigarettes from reputable retailers in the UK,” she added.
Billboards and point-of-sale advertising do not count as broadcasting so are allowed in the UK, although the Scottish government has given itself powers to limit these.
E-cigarettes are not covered by the UK’s smoke-free legislation. Some organisations have chosen to ban vaping on their premises, including Transport for London on its trains, buses and stations. Public Health England has published guidance to help premises come to their own decisions.
https://www.bat.com/group/sites/UK__9D9KCY.nsf/vwPagesWebLive/DOBHFEVY
Since May 2017, all e-cigarettes and e-liquids have had to be notified to The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency before they can be sold. There are also requirements around labelling and warnings. Certain ingredients including colourings, caffeine and taurine are banned, and the nicotine strength of e-liquids is restricted.
Nicotine and your heart
Nicotine, while highly addictive, is not a significant health hazard for people without heart conditions. It does not cause acute cardiac events or coronary heart disease, and is not carcinogenic. But nicotine is a problem for people with heart disease. It raises the heart rate, contradicting the goal of most treatments. Tell your GP if you have heart disease and are using nicotine replacement.
So there you have 2 contradictory findings altogether the first study is rather misleading.
Nobody suggests you start vaping but if you are smoking, e-cigarettes / vaping should be used as a smoking cessation tool. Tobacco Harm Reduction by vaping is almost 3 times as effective as other Nicotine Replacement Therapies.
Usually the UK is behind the US in most things bit we are fortunate to have this tobacco harm reduction tool to assist others quit the deadly tobacco.
Lung cancer was once a very rare disease, so rare that doctors took special notice when confronted with a case, thinking it a once-in-a-lifetime oddity. Mechanisation and mass marketing towards the end of the 19th century popularised the cigarette habit, however, causing a global lung cancer epidemic. Cigarettes were recognised as the cause of the epidemic in the 1940s and 1950s, with the confluence of studies from epidemiology, animal experiments, cellular pathology and chemical analytics.
Cigarette manufacturers disputed this evidence, as part of an orchestrated conspiracy to salvage cigarette sales. Propagandising the public proved successful, judging from secret tobacco industry measurements of the impact of denialist propaganda. As late as 1960 only one-third of all US doctors believed that the case against cigarettes had been established. The cigarette is the deadliest artefact in the history of human civilisation.
Cigarettes cause about 1.5 million deaths from lung cancer per year, a number that will rise to nearly 2 million per year by the 2020s or 2030s, even if consumption rates decline in the interim. Part of the ease of cigarette manufacturing stems from the ubiquity of high-speed cigarette making machines, which crank out 20,000 cigarettes per min. Cigarette makers make about a penny in profit for every cigarette sold, which means that the value of a life to a cigarette maker is about US $10,000.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22345227/
