Vaping may not only be as harmful as smoking regular cigarettes, but can also trigger unique immune responses in lungs, causing deadly inflammatory diseases, a study warns.
Immune responses are the biological reactions of cells and fluids to an outside substance the body does not recognise as its own. Such immune responses play roles in disease, including lung disease spurred on by cigarette use. The study, published in the American journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, looked at possible biomarkers of harm in the lungs and found that in some ways using e-cigarettes could be just as bad as smoking cigarettes.
Researchers from University North Carolina in the US compared sputum samples from 15 e-cigarette users, 14 cigarette smokers and 15 non-smokers. They found e-cigarette users uniquely exhibited significant increases in: Neutrophil granulocyteand neutrophil-extracellular-trap-(NET) related proteins in airways. E-cigarette users also showed significant increases in NETs outside the lung, researchers said.