What is more harmful?
Scientists have named the most harmful electronic cigarettes
Vanilla and cinnamon-scented fillers turned out to be the most toxic and dangerous among all nicotine liquids for vapes and e-cigarettes, according to an article published in the journal PLoS Biology (Sassano et al., Evaluation of e-liquid toxicity using an open-source high-throughput screening assay).
"We found that liquids for electronic vaporizers are very diverse in their chemical composition, and that many of them contain substances more toxic and dangerous than nicotine itself. We hope that our methodology for studying these fillers will help regulators formulate the right policy to limit their turnover," said Robert Tarran from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (in a press release Some e–cigarette ingredients are more toxic than others).
In the last two years, thanks to the rapid growth in the popularity of vapes among smokers, scientists have begun to actively wonder whether such vaporizers have the beneficial properties attributed to them by their manufacturers, and how much they are less harmful to health than conventional cigarettes.
These studies have led to contradictory results – in general, tobacco smoke turned out to be more dangerous to the health of the lungs and the entire human body, however, the vapors of electronic cigarettes, as scientists have recently found out, contain a lot of carcinogens and toxins produced as a result of "burning" part of the evaporated liquid on the incandescent spiral, and leaching heavy metals from it.
According to Tarran, today there are almost eight thousand different fillers for vapes, each of which contains, in addition to nicotine and two solvents – propylene glycol and glycerin, also a unique set of aromatic additives and other additives. All these substances can interact with each other and change during heating and evaporation of liquids, and their effect on the body of users of such evaporators is almost not studied.
Tarran and his colleagues have created a technique that allows you to quickly and accurately assess the toxicity of such fillers. It works in a very simple way – first, scientists sow a special template with human lung and connective tissue cells, placing them in wells with a nutrient medium, and then pass through each of them steam from an electronic cigarette.
If these vapors contain toxic substances, then the growth and division of cells in these micro-samples will slow down by a certain amount. This allows us to estimate the relative "killing power" of all the studied fillers for vapes at once. Using this system, doctors compared 148 aromatic liquids popular among vaping enthusiasts in America at once, and named the most toxic of them.
Interestingly, absolutely all fillers for electronic cigarettes, including those that had no taste and smell, slowed down cell growth. This, according to scientists, suggests that the decomposition products of propylene glycol and glycerin (PG/VG) can be toxic to humans by themselves.
Living cells are colored green, dead cells are red.
In turn, the toxic and carcinogenic properties of the fillers themselves were very different. Some of them, for example, blueberry-scented liquid, did not kill cells much more than the solvents themselves, and other flavors, such as the smell of vanilla, banana and cinnamon, caused their mass death even at minimal concentrations.
Importantly, an increase in the concentration of all these substances led to a rapid increase in the number of dead cells. This suggests that aromatic liquids of any type are dangerous to the health of a smoker with a sufficiently large number of additives in the fillers for vaping.
Now Tarran's team and the American FDA, an analogue of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation, are creating an extensive database on the properties of fillers for electronic cigarettes. This information, scientists hope, will help convince the public and politicians that the turnover of electronic cigarettes and their fillers should be regulated no less than the sale of conventional tobacco.
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