Scientists just found even more ways vaping can kill you
There was a decade or so where vaping existed in a liminal space. Common sense dictates that deeply inhaling a mysterious cocktail of chemicals and liquids from a plastic gizmo probably isn’t great for you. Still, there wasn’t a whole lot of science that definitively said it was worse than smoking tobacco, so millions, maybe billions, around the world indulged in the blissful ignorance of vaping.
A massive new review of studies out of Australia just dropped a bombshell we pretty much all saw coming: vaping nicotine is likely to cause lung and mouth cancer.
The research team published their findings in the journal Carcinogenesisanalyzed reams of human data, animal studies, and lab-based cellular studies published since 2017. Instead of comparing vaping to smoking, which sounds logical but isn’t exactly a one-to-one experience, they decided to focus on the effects of vaping itself, and that was it.
What they found were consistent signs of DNA damage, oxidative stress and inflammation in human users. They also found tumor development in mice exposed to vape aerosols and chemical pathways that show how compounds in vape liquid can disrupt cells in ways that mirror the same effects of known cancer-causing carcinogens.
They searched through case reports describing otherwise low-risk individuals such as young people who are heavy users who develop aggressive oral cancers without the usual suspects like long-term cigarette smoking or viral infections.
Is vaping as deadly as traditional smoking?
The team is clear to say that none of this is conclusive and that, as the scientific method dictates, others are more than welcome to pick apart their research to find fault, but it is enough to at least suggest that there is a link between vaping and a variety of cancers.
The research team does not claim that vaping is as risky as smoking. There is still a lot of research left ahead before that claim can be definitively made, if it can be made at all. But the direction of all the published research the team examined points strongly in the same direction, and the evidence is getting harder to ignore.
Now that more and more research is revealing this pattern, scientists from around the world are doing what the publishers of this study are doing, urging the world and government regulators not to wait half a century to act on the results, especially if the past has shown us exactly where it’s all going.
