Dr. Marc Siegel: More dangers of e-cigarettes are coming to light

There was more evidence this week that the electronic cigarettes used by millions of American teens pose serious health risks. Electronic Cigarette are battery-powered devices that in most cases heat a flavored nicotine solution, turning it into a vapor that can be inhaled – a practice known as vaping. The e-cigarettes differ in how much nicotine they deliver.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who stepped down Friday as Food and Drug Administration commissioner, issued a powerful statement Wednesday revealing that 35 users of e-cigarettes had seizures after vaping between 2010 and this year.We don’t know how many more seizures experienced by users of the devices were never reported. We don’t know if the process of vaping itself or nicotine from the vapor caused the seizures. We also don’t know how much vaping in a single session would be enough to cause a potential problem.

Recent studies in animals have shown that high amounts of nicotine in the brain can trigger seizures and brain injuries.Gottlieb said a recent large toxicology study showed that the impact of vaping on the lungs includes the development of inflammation and pre-malignant changes.

There is clearly no free lunch with e-cigarettes. You should not consider them to be harmless devices with no health impacts.

According to the National Youth Tobacco Survey, more than 3.6 million middle and high school students used e-cigarettes in 2018, making the devices the most commonly used tobacco product among this age group. This turns out to be a stunning 78 percent increase in e-cigarette use among high school students and a 48 percent increase among middle school student use over the previous year.Electronic Cigarette
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