Electronic cigarettes, known as vapes, contain nicotine and various chemicals, including some used for flavoring, which makes them more attractive to young people. Despite safeguards such as age restrictions and flavor bans, all types of vaping products remain readily available online.
Thus, Canada has one of the highest youth vaping rates in the world. In response to the urgent need to understand the long-term effects of vaping, researchers at the McGill University Health Center Research Institute (RI-MUHC), in collaboration with colleagues at the Lady Davis Medical Research Institute (LDI), studied vaping products popular among teenagers and examined their effects in the laboratory. What did they find about young men vaping?
The researchers used mouse models that mirror the types of diseases that people develop throughout life and exposed these models to e-cigarette aerosols for different periods of time. The results suggest that young men who vape may be at a higher risk of heart disease.
The first study, published in BMJ Open Respiratory Researchshows that vaping a popular e-cigarette brand even for a short period of time causes significant changes in the lungs that affect important biological pathways, a set of molecular events necessary for the body to function properly.
Young men who vape more exposed to health risks than women
“In this study, we observed changes in metabolism, detoxification and lipid signaling pathways, some of which are associated with the development of heart disease. Thus, we conducted another study, where we observed the development of atherosclerosis, a condition that can cause heart attacks,” explains Dr. Carolyn Baglole, researcher in the Translational Research Program in Respiratory Diseases at RI-MUHC and lead author of both studies .
In fact, the findings of the second study, published in Toxicology and Applied Pharmacologyshowed that although e-cigarette aerosols produced minimal inflammation in the lungs and body, long-term daily exposure to tobacco-flavored vaping products caused an increase in circulating lipid (fat) levels and an accumulation of plaques in the heart and blood vessels, a phenomenon known as atherosclerosis.
“These results are important because they suggest that vaping may increase the risk of cardiovascular problems, such as heart attack or stroke,” says Dr. Koren Mann, LDI researcher and head of the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at McGill, who co-authored the studies. .
Young men who vape can have lung problems
“In both studies, the changes seen in the lungs and heart were more prominent in men, suggesting that vaping may disproportionately affect men. This raises significant concerns for the future health of young men who are currently vaping,” adds Baglole, who is also an associate professor in McGill University’s Department of Medicine and director of the McGill Cannabis Research Centre.
In these studies, the researchers used high-throughput analyzes (ie, large-scale experiments that allow testing of a large number of compounds) on legal vaping products in Quebec and across Canada. The scientists examined how the chemicals in these products affect the lungs, using levels and patterns of daily exposure that mimic typical adolescent use, reports Medical Xpress.
“E-cigarettes are sometimes perceived as harmless because they are compared to tobacco smoke, which we know causes many diseases. E-cigarettes are different from tobacco in part because they don’t cause as much inflammation. For this reason, we did not compare tobacco smoking with vaping, but looked for unknown effects of vaping that are not necessarily associated with smoking,” explains Prof. Baglole.
Long-term studies are needed
“As we expected, in our experiments, vaping did not cause inflammation in the lungs, but it had other important negative effects, including changes in processes deep in the lungs that could influence disease risk in a different way.” , says Vincenza Caruana, author of the second study and PhD student at RI-MUHC, supervised by Prof. Baglole and Prof. Mann.
More research is needed to understand why men are more affected by e-cigarette aerosols than women. Given the rapid changes in the vaping market and their addictive nature, the study authors emphasize the need to further study popular products such as disposable vapes and oral nicotine sachets, as well as cannabis-based vaping products, which they are also popular among teenagers and young adults.
“Due to its recent emergence, we lack data on the risks associated with vaping. Its rampant popularity among the youth should prompt us to investigate the long-term effects, and that is exactly what we will continue to do,” says Prof. Baglole.
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Source: www.descopera.ro
