Source: www.examiner.com
Author: W. Mark Dendy

A new study conducted by researchers at the University of Athens in Greece and presented at the European Respiratory Society’s Annual Congress in Vienna in September 2012 sheds some new light on the risks of the electronic cigarette.

The study was a phase I clinical trial in which 32 participants each smoked a single e-cigarette for 10 minutes and had their airway resistance measured using a number of different respiratory tests before and immediately afterward. Respiratory tests carried out by the researchers included:
• spirometry (a test looking at various measures of lung function)
• static lung volume
• airway resistance (the obstruction of the airways to airflow)
• airway conductance (a measure related to airway resistance)
• single breath nitrogen test (a measure of how adequate inspiration and expiration is)

According to one of the researchers, Professor Christine Gratziou, the main finding of the study was that after smoking one e-cigarette for 10 minutes there was “an immediate rise in airway resistance in our group of participants, which suggests e-cigarettes can cause immediate harm after smoking the device”.

Gratziou added that “more research is needed to understand whether this harm also has lasting effects in the long-term”.

The airway resistance lasted for longer than 10 minutes in all of the 32 people, suggesting that air was not passing so easily through their airways.

In a study presented back in April 2012, a chemical known as (S)-N’-nitrosonornicotine, or (S)-NNN, which is present in smokeless tobacco products, was reported to be a strong oral carcinogen.

“(S)-NNN is the only chemical in smokeless tobacco known to cause oral cancer,” according to Silvia Balbo, Ph.D., research associate at the Masonic Cancer Center of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minn who conducted an experiment in which doses of (S)-NNN approximately equivalent to the amount of (S)-NNN to which a smokeless tobacco user would be exposed from chronic use of these products were administered to four groups of 24 rats.

All rats assigned to (S)-NNN alone or the combination began losing weight after one year of exposure and died by 17 months.

Additionally, Balbo reported at the American Association of Cancer Research’s annual meeting that all the rats given (S)-NNN had esophageal tumors and demonstrated 100 percent incidence of oral tumors including tumors of the tongue, buccal mucosa, soft palate and pharynx.

She concluded, “This finding provides mechanistic underpinning for the epidemiologic observations that smokeless tobacco products cause oral cancer.”

The e-cigarette has been touted as beneficial to someone wanting to quit smoking, but after viewing the results of these two recent studies, that appears to just be a marketing ploy!