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 fluids from a plastic gizmo probably isn’t great for you. Still, there wasn’t a whole lot of science definitively saying it was worse than smoking tobacco, so millions, maybe billions around the world indulged in the blissful ignorance of vaping.
A massive new study of studies out of Australia just dropped a bombshell that we pretty much all saw coming: vaping nicotine is likely to cause lung and oral cancers.
The research team, which published their findings in the journal Carcinogenesis, analyzed reams of human data, animal experiments, 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’s 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 showing how compounds in vape liquid can disrupt cells in ways that mirror the same effects of known cancer-causing carcinogens.
They pored through case reports that describe otherwise low-risk individuals like young people who are heavy users developing 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 definitive, and that, as the scientific method dictates, others are more than welcome to pick apart their research to find faults, but it is enough to at least suggest that there is a link between vaping and a variety of cancers.
The research team isn’t claiming that vaping is just as risky as smoking. There’s still a lot of research left ahead before that claim can be definitively made, if it can ever be made at all. But the direction of all the published research the team studied is strongly pointing in the same direction, and the evidence is getting harder to ignore.
Now that more and more research is uncovering this pattern, scientists from all over the world are doing what the publishers of this study are doing, urging the world and governmental regulators not to wait half a century to act on the findings, especially if the past has shown us exactly where this is all heading.
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