NEWS
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NEWS
A GAME CHANGING STUDY
Long-term vaping presents “ no risk in long-term vapers who have never smoked in their life ” says new research .
As 2017 draws to a close , vape businesses and their allies may fondly look back on it as The Year of the Study . The past eleven months have provided publication after publication refuting some longstanding claims about the supposed dangers of e-cigarettes and liquids . We ’ ve seen the myth of vaping as a gateway to smoking soundly unravel at the hands of Dr Lynn Kozlowski , and Dr Lion Shahab delivered a startling revelation with a snappy statistic to match : that vaping is at least 95 % safer than combustible cigarette smoking .
This latest step may prove one of the biggest yet . Not just for 2017 , but for the entire history of vapour products . As the leading conference of its kind , the annual E-Cigarette summit , hosted at the Royal Society in London , has been home to numerous influential announcements that have shaken up the global vape industry . The Summit for 2017 was no different . In a young , strong industry defined by its seismic events and leaps forward , this latest landmark comes to us courtesy of Professor Ricardo Polosa , who Vapouround first met at the IBVTA ’ s launch conference in April .
On Friday 17 November at 8am , during the summit ’ s press conference , it was formally announced that Professor Polosa had fronted “ the first study on long-term regular e-cigarettes use in users who have never smoked .” The study , titled : Health impact of E-cigarettes : a prospective 3.5-year study of regular daily users who have never smoked – was completed in June and submitted for peer review . It was accepted by October , and debuted publicly that very Friday morning .
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Always direct and clear , Professor Polosa tweeted out the study with the following statement :
“ In spite of previous health scares , our study shows for the first time no risk in long-term vapers who have never smoked in their life .”
The regulatory sphere in the e-cigarette trade is often a harsh , bitterly contested frontier , with its political developments shaped by public opinion and perceptions of vaping . There have been two consistent outliers that have defined such debates .
The first is the effect of vapour on the body compared with smoke . Vaping has had a hard time shedding its ( often unjust ) public affiliation with smoking . As a smoking cessation tool ( and one typically not recommended to non-smokers ) the e-cigarette is in direct competition with the combustible , and battles between vape and tobacco companies have been waged in the court of public opinion . By pursuing this study , Professor Polosa and his colleagues took an extremely rare “ blank slate ” of bodies untouched entirely by cigarette smoke , enabling them to focus fully on what vaping alone would do .
The second outlier is the lack of information regarding vaping in the long term . A quintessentially twenty-first century phenomenon , the arrival of what we know today as e-cigarettes came as the culmination of decades of failed attempts to deliver nicotine without tobacco . This study has covered a three-and-a-half-year period , keeping close track of the effects of vapourised nicotine on the bodies of its subjects . Though we still lack the multiple decades of hindsight attained by studies of tobacco smoking , this is a significant step forward .
See our main feature in this issue for an in-depth look at how this study unfolded and what it means . You can also read it yourself ; the text can be accessed in full at www . nature . com / scientificreports
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