Vaping impacts blood vessels & oxygen, new study says

WASHINGTON (TNND) — Nicotine or not, a new study is looking into how vaping affects your health. According to new research presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, vaping has an immediate effect on how a person’s blood vessels work and how much oxygen they can breathe in.

Alan Blum, a professor of family medicine at the University of Alabama said that while no one is suggesting e-cigarettes will cause lung cancer, research like this study is needed, to demonstrate how vaping can affect the human body.

“I just can’t help but believe that the long-term effect of breathing in something that’s causing your heart to race is not going to have (a) lasting effect,” Blum said.

For Blum, this study was a conversation starter. Vaping has been around for nearly two decades and he believes it’s about time we start talking about the health impacts.

Yeah, they’re not as dangerous as cigarettes but that’s not to say that they are in anyway shape or form better for you for heart disease,” said Blum.

Keith Ferdinand, a professor of medicine at Tulane University and Cara Poland, a professor at Michigan State’s College of Human Medicine both said the results of this study show vaping can impact how a person’s blood vessels work.

“Vaping may be deleterious to the blood vessels,” Ferdinand said.

The blood vessels usually are somewhat elastic so they can bend and move a little bit and they can become stiffer and harder to move,” Poland added.

Poland said the study also shows that using e-cigarettes decreased a metric known as venous oxygen saturation. Meaning, the lungs were taking in less oxygen.

“We know that some of the additives that they put into vaping like propylene glycol and glycerol do have toxic effects on the lungs,” said Poland.

This is another reason Ferdinand believes these results prove there is no shortcut to good health.

“Vaping is not approved by the FDA to get a person to stop smoking or for smoking sensation and it should not be used as such,” said Ferdinand.