USAGE OF E-CIGARETTES COULD DOUBLE CHANCES OF GETTING HEART ATTACKS
As stated in a new analysis survey of nearly 70,000 people, led by researchers at UC San Francisco, the use of e-cigarettes every day can nearly double the odds of a heart attack.
Researchers also found that dual use of e-cigarettes and conventional cigarettes appears to be more dangerous than using either product alone raising that daily use of both kinds of cigarettes increases the heart attack risk five-fold when compared to people who don’t use either product.
“Most adults who use e-cigarettes continue to smoke cigarettes,” said senior author Stanton Glantz, PhD, a UCSF professor of medicine and director of the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education.
“While people may think they are reducing their health risks, we found that the heart attack risk of e-cigarettes adds to the risk of smoking cigarettes,” Glantz said. “Using both products at the same time is worse than using either one separately. Someone who continues to smoke daily while using e-cigarettes daily increases the odds of a heart attack by a factor of five.”
But the research also reported some good news if smokers quit:
“The risk of heart attack starts to drop immediately after you stop smoking,” said Glantz. “Our results suggest the same is true when they stop using e-cigarettes.”
Electronic cigarettes commonly deliver an aerosol of nicotine and other flavors by heating a liquid and are promoted as a safer alternative to conventional cigarettes, which generate the nicotine aerosol by burning tobacco.
While e-cigarettes distribute lower levels of carcinogens than conventional cigarettes, they deliver both ultrafine particles — which are 1/50 to 1/100 the size of a human hair — and other toxins that have been linked to increased cardiovascular and non-cancer lung disease risks.
The new analysis involved 69,452 people who were interviewed through National Health Interview Surveys in 2014 and 2016, a cross-sectional study in which in-person interviewers asked participants whether they had ever used e-cigarettes and/or cigarettes, and whether they had ever been told by a doctor or other health professional that they had had a heart attack.
Among the 9,352 current and former e-cigarette users, 333 (3.6 %) had experienced a heart attack at some point, with the highest percentage (6.1 %) among those who used e-cigarettes daily. In the analysis, a quarter of the 2,259 people who currently used e-cigarettes were former smokers of conventional cigarettes and about 66 % of current e-cigarette users were also current cigarette smokers.
The researchers found that the total odds of having a heart attack were about the same for those who continued to smoke cigarettes daily as those who switched to daily e-cigarette use. For those who used both products daily, the odds of having had a heart attack were 4.6 times that of people who had never used either product.
This is the first study to examine the relationship between e-cigarette use and heart attacks, and begins to fill the understanding of the effects of e-cigarettes on long-term health. The study was published Aug. 22, 2018, in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
Erudite Nursing Institute? calls nurse researchers to furtherly study the subject about the relation between e-cigarette smoking and cardiovascular health to furtherly widen the understanding of its dangerous underlying effects in order to discover new breakthroughs to reverse its negative impact to human health.
LINK SOURCE:
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-08/uoc–roh082118.php
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