How safe is the use of electronic cigarettes? For WHO, No

Posted on August 17, 2013 by john in Weight loss and diet plans

The snuff is still one of the major concerns of modern medicine. Not only for the various causes respiratory problems (apart from bad breath), but also by the terrible lung cancer can produce, and the great health spending reaches induce treating smokers. Slowly it seems that we realize the danger involved consumption (and how expensive it is becoming the habit), and tends to dip into alternative solutions to quit gradually, like cigarettes e. But is it a good solution? Are they safe? For WHO think the answer is NO.

The problem is that there is little control on this type of product, as there is no specific regulatory body for this type of substance that can verify their effectiveness as quality and safety. Therefore, WHO recommends (at least for now) that consumers do not use it until proven scientifically useful.

On the other hand, no one knows for certain the amount of nicotine in cigarettes such, it varies a lot between different brands. We can speak of between 6 and 24 mg of nicotine in some cigarette to more than 100 mg in others, regardless that some products include. These products can cite propylene glycol, an irritant when inhaled.

“There’s no way for consumers to know how it affects them really what they are inhaling the product they have purchased. It is suspected that the dose varies considerably depending on the product, which contain nicotine in various amounts and concentrations ”

“The affirmation of the implicit benefits associated health are unfounded or may be based on inaccurate or misleading”

On the other hand, studies such as the recently published in PLoS ONE, which states that 1 in 10 smokers manage to leave the snuff thanks to these products, at least one year, which was the time during which took study conducted by researchers at the University of Catania, Italy.

This study had the collaboration of 300 smokers with no intention to leave the snuff, just were curious about the electronic cigarette. So they were divided into three groups: one group used cigarettes with 7.2 mg of nicotine, the second group used cigarettes with 5.4 mg of nicotine, and a final group used nicotine-free cigarettes.

According to the results, 13% of participants who had used higher doses of nicotine quit smoking, to 9% in the left middle group, and only 4% of those who used nicotine-free cigarettes were able to stop the habit. The bad part is that there was no control group as such (without using electronic cigarettes or other alternative methods), so it is not known how many would be able to quit by sheer will, but researchers estimate that would be about 2%.

Anyway, it would be equally necessary to create a regulatory body of these substances, and many more studies to demonstrate the product’s safety and effectiveness (would not hurt a control group, for example). So far the WHO recommendation is not to use this method, see what happens in the coming years.