We are all aware that smoking is bad for our health, thanks to the many campaigns, stop smoking support schemes and restrictions on buying cigarettes, it is a public health message that we are familiar with, and one that’s worked- as a nation we are smoking less.
One of the many ways in which smokers have helped break the habit is by using e-cigarettes (vapes). Vapes have been on the UK market since just 2005 but have become increasingly popular, and controversial. It is thought that vaping is safer than smoking, and it’s even been promoted as a tool to help stop people smoking cigarettes. Yet, as they haven’t been around long enough, we still don’t have the data needed to fully understand the long-term health implications and whether they are truly ‘safe’.
Research published today by Dr Chiara Herzog from UCL EGA Institute for Women’s Health and University of Innsbruck and supported by The Eve Appeal, has found that vaping causes some changes to the DNA in cells in the mouth which are similar to changes seen in smokers. It isn’t yet enough evidence to say that vaping causes cancer, but it’s a step in building a better understanding of how vaping effects the body, and a sure sign that we need to do more work in this area to answer the key question- is vaping safe or not when it comes to cancer risk.
This question is even more important considering the increasing uptake of vaping in the younger generation, and in people who didn’t otherwise smoke. It is estimated that 1 in 5 children have tried vaping, and their use in the young had tripled in the last three years.
The study, published in Cancer Research, looked at the epigenetic effects of tobacco and e-cigarettes in over 3,500 samples from areas of the body both directly exposed to smoking/vaping and those that aren’t- cheek, blood and cervical cells.
The epigenome is an extra layer of information on our DNA. If the DNA is like the ‘hardware’ of a computer, with all the components needed to run the machine, epigenetics are the computer’s ‘software’ and have the information on how, where and when the programs used by the computer are run- i.e. which DNA is read and acted upon where.
Epigenomes change throughout our lives and can be affected by environmental and lifestyle factors– aging, exposure to hormones, chemicals and even stress and psychological trauma. Professor Martin Widschwendter from UCL EGA Institute for Women’s Health and University of Innsbruck, believes the epigenome can be used as a tool to indicate potential cancer risk, he says: “The epigenome allows us, on one side, to look back. It tells us about how our body responded to a previous environmental exposure like smoking. Likewise exploring the epigenome may also enable us to predict future health and disease.”
The research team found that the cells in the mouth had significant epigenetic changes in smokers, which were even greater in people with lung cancer or with precancerous cell changes. Similar changes were seen in people who vaped and had smoked less than 100 cigarettes in their life. Dr Herzog said: “This is the first study to investigate the impact of smoking and vaping on different kinds of cells – rather than just blood and although we cannot say that e-cigarettes cause cancer based on our study, we do observe e-cigarette users exhibit some similar epigenetic changes in cheek cells as smokers, and these changes are associated with future lung cancer development in smokers.
“While the scientific consensus is that e-cigarettes are safer than smoking tobacco, we cannot assume they are completely safe to use and it is important to explore their potential long-term risks and links to cancer. We hope this study may help form part of a wider discussion into e-cigarette usage – especially in people who have never previously smoked tobacco.”