Studying and Communicating the Dangers of Vaping
From left: Damien Lu, Kambez H. Benam
“Just because something is safe to consume as food does not mean that it’s safe to inhale,” says Kambez H. Benam, associate professor in the Department of Medicine Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, and Critical Care Medicine, and in the Department of Bioengineering in the Swanson School of Engineering.
His team discovered that adding menthol flavor to electronic cigarette liquids produces more vapor particles and is associated with worse lung function than in those who smoke. Using a specially designed robotic system that mimics the mechanics of human breathing and vaping behavior— called the Human Vaping Mimetic Real-time Particle Analyzer—researchers in Benam’s lab showed that commercially available e-cigarette liquids containing menthol generate a greater number of toxic microparticles compared to menthol-free liquid.
In addition, their analysis of patient records from a cohort of smokers with a history of e-cigarette use revealed that menthol vapers took shallower breaths and had poorer lung function compared to non-menthol e-cigarette users regardless of potential confounding factors such as age, gender, race, smoking history, and the use of nicotine- or cannabis-containing vaping products.
Elsewhere on campus, in a study led by Beth Hoffman, assistant professor in the School of Public Health’s Department of Behavioral and Community Health Sciences, middle school students who participated in the study didn’t originally know about some of the dangers associated with vaping, including the lung disease EVALI (E-cigarette- or vaping-use-associated lung injury). Her team found that watching clips from popular TV shows that depicted young people getting sick from vaping may be an effective health education tool, with some students specifically remarking that it was better than a more formal anti-drug curriculum like the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program (D.A.R.E.). Hoffman noted that a key finding is vocabulary; many young people in the study did not recognize that vaping is synonymous with using an e-cigarette.