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Review Finds that E-Cigs are Safe and May Help Smokers to Quit

posted by martyb on Thursday September 15 2016, @11:37PM   
from the put-that-in-your-pipe... dept.

takyon writes:

Electronic cigarettes that heat propylene glycol and glycerol, with or without nicotine and flavours, have been found to be safe based on a new meta-analysis of studies:

An update to the Cochrane review on electronic cigarettes [DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD010216.pub3] [DX] has restated the findings of the initial research, which was completed two years ago. It found that e-cigarettes are potentially a valuable smoking cessation aid, although there was not enough evidence to conclude that they helped people quit smoking confidently.

The updated review now also includes observational data from an additional 11 studies which found no serious side-effects from using e-cigs for up to two years. Aside from throat and mouth irritation, which commonly dissipated over time, the review's co-author, Jamie Hartmann-Boyce, said "in the short to medium term, we didn't find any evidence that they were associated with any serious side-effects."

Evidence from two trials found that e-cigarettes helped smokers to quit in the long term, but "the small number of trials, low event rates and wide confidence intervals around the estimates" meant that the researchers could not conclude with confidence that e-cigs helped smokers quit more than other cessation aids.

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Original Submission

• How many of those studies were compromised How many of those studies were compromised (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16 2016, @01:25AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16 2016, @01:25AM (#402578)

  By gifts to the researchers from the manufacturers?

  Whenever a story on that comes up, nobody here is surprised. But it takes 30 years to come to light.

  People need to use common sense. Don't tell us 25 years from now that you were lied to. THINK about it now.

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• Re:How many of those studies were compromised (Score: 4, Informative) by melikamp on Friday September 16 2016, @02:25AM

  by melikamp (1886) on Friday September 16 2016, @02:25AM (#402589) Journal

  Some of the studies are probably compromised, but that's not the whole story, not even a bigger part of it. The elephant in the room is the duration of these studies: 2 years total, so some studies are probably even shorter than that. This is laughable. Take for example the Framingham Heart Study, which linked for the first time smoking tobacco with heart disease. It was a 20 year study. More to the point from a professional:

  Avrum Spira is a Boston University School of Medicine professor of medicine and pathology and bioinformatics, the Alexander Graham Bell Professor of Healthcare Entrepreneurship, and chief of the Division of Computational Biomedicine. He is a pulmonologist at Boston Medical Center. With funding from the National Institutes of Health and, more recently, the Department of Defense, he has been working to develop molecular tests for early detection of lung cancer. Spira talked with BU Research about his research into the health effects of e-cigarettes, which is being funded by the FDA.

  BU Research: You’re a pulmonary researcher who has done groundbreaking work on early-stage lung cancer detection. You’re also a pulmonary care physician and you’ve spent years treating patients with advanced lung cancer who had been heavy smokers. What are your concerns about e-cigarettes?

  Spira: It took decades after cigarettes were introduced to sort out the health effects, which were devastating. Many people got addicted and they couldn’t quit once the health effects became clear. The devastation is truly hard to imagine; according to the 2014 Surgeon General’s report, more than 20 million deaths have been attributed to smoking in the US since the 1960s. The tobacco companies have recognized for many years that their product is hurting their customers, which also impacts their sales. So they have recently started to develop “safer” products. There is a lot of controversy around this. How do we know a “safer” product is really safer?

  BU: But before the big tobacco companies got involved, weren’t e-cigarettes introduced and produced by independent companies as a way to get a nicotine hit without the tobacco and carcinogenic tar—as a safe alternative to cigarettes?

  S: Yes, we could say that e-cigarette products have exploded in the marketplace, specifically in terms of brands, delivery devices, flavors, nicotine concentrations, as well as the delivery liquids. It’s a complicated, fascinating, and rapidly moving space. There are currently a myriad of ingredients that can be combined in different ways to produce the vapor. This does present a challenge for researchers looking to identify the agents that are harmful, as each e-cigarette product is potentially different than the next. The FDA is trying to get a handle on standardization and potential risks of e-cigarette products by funding groups like ours to develop systems to rapidly assess these factors. But the research community is still scrambling to keep up with the rapid and unanticipated changes in this field.

  https://www.bu.edu/research/articles/behind-the-vapor/ [bu.edu]

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• Re:How many of those studies were compromised (Score: 2) by sjames on Friday September 16 2016, @06:18AM

  by sjames (2882) on Friday September 16 2016, @06:18AM (#402644) Journal

  The ecig industry isn't like the tobacco industry. It's mostly small sole proprietorships renting one single building with less than 100 employees. Even the ones turning a profit aren't going to be able to offer the sort of gifts that make researchers consider risking a career over."Hey, if you fake your data I can get you a REALLY good discount at Jimbo's used cars!".

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