E-cigarettes Flavoring May Be Bad For The Heart
Saturday, June 1st, 2019 -- 6:41 AM
E-cigarettes aren't considered as risky as regular cigarettes, but researchers have found a clue that their flavorings may be bad for the heart.Longtime smokers who can't kick the addiction sometimes switch to e-cigarettes, in hopes of avoiding the cancer-causing chemicals in tobacco smoke. But cigarette smoking doesn't just cause lung cancer. It's a leading cause of heart attacks, too, and little is known about e-cigarettes and heart disease. Chemicals in the inhaled vapor may pose unique risks that are important to understand, especially as more and more teens take up vaping. So a team, in laboratory dishes, grew cells that normally line healthy human blood vessels. They exposed the cells to six different e-cigarette flavorings, testing if the flavors, and not just the nicotine, caused any effects.
They also tracked what happened when those cells were bathed in blood taken from people right after they had an e-cigarette, the way chemicals from vaping would make their way to the cardiovascular system. They also compared the cells' exposure to blood from nonsmokers and people who smoked a regular cigarette. Vaping and some flavorings, even without nicotine, triggered blood vessel dysfunction that can increase the risk of heart disease, the researchers reported in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. (AP)
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