Once again about the dangers of vapers
Scientists have confirmed the mutagenic activity of electronic cigarettes
Sergey Vasiliev, Naked Science
Electronic cigarettes, which have become so fashionable in recent years, allow you to inhale nicotine in the form of an aerosol without burning tobacco leaves and without creating a mass of harmful by-products. Such products are often served even as non-carcinogenic, although their real health effects are still being evaluated by doctors, and many organizations advocate the introduction of the same strict regulation for electronic cigarettes as for conventional ones.
Last year, experiments on individual molecules "in vitro" showed that aerosols of electronic cigarettes can damage DNA. In a new paper, Moon-shong Tang from New York University and his co-authors demonstrated this danger also in vivo, on a living model organism. Scientists talk about the experiments in an article published by the journal PNAS.
Scientists exposed laboratory mice to "puffs" of aerosols from electronic cigarettes for 12 weeks, which, taking into account their life expectancy, can be considered the equivalent of ten years of human smoking experience. As a result, such animals showed signs of mutations, DNA damage in the tissues of the heart, lungs and bladder. In comparison with the "non-smoking" mice from the control group, their lung cells produced fewer proteins necessary for DNA repair and its restoration in case of random mutations.
The same picture was given by parallel experiments conducted with human lung and bladder cell cultures after treatment with nicotine and nicotine-derived nitrosamine ketone (NNK), the carcinogenic effect of which has long been proven. This, according to the authors, allows us to say that in some tissues of the whole organism, substances contained in aerosols of electronic cigarettes turn into genotoxic and mutagenic derivatives. As a result, the intensity of DNA damage increases, and the risk of malignant cell degeneration increases. And although this danger is less than when smoking ordinary cigarettes, it is still much greater than that of non-smokers at all.
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