Smoking is harmful to health, but what about e-cigarettes?

According to media reports, a few days ago, Nanjing 120 received calls for help from many students from a university in Nanjing. In one night, nine college students experienced dizziness, panic, and even irritability and were sent to the hospital emergency room. It is understood that these students collectively developed the above symptoms after smoking an e-cigarette purchased online.

The following is a picture of the e-cigarette being smoked, and it clearly says TETRA.

TETRA, also known as Tetra Hydro Cannabinol (THC), is translated into Chinese as: tetrahydrocannabinol

This thing is an extract of cannabis plants, mainly concentrated in the leaves and stems of cannabis, and is a hallucinogen.

The condition of these nine students after taking the drugs was clearly similar to that of drug abuse, with symptoms such as paralysis, hallucinations, and accelerated heartbeat.

So, they are taking drugs. Let's talk about this matter from two aspects: the harm of e-cigarettes and tobacco to humans. . .

First of all, smoking illegal things has nothing to do with the product

In fact, I have heard of the practice of "inducing drug use" a long time ago. At that time, the common saying was that drugs were mixed into cigarettes or alcoholic beverages.

Now, atomization devices such as e-cigarettes can naturally also atomize drugs.

Secondly, e-cigarettes should be an alternative strategy to smoking

Because many people have serious smoking addiction, atomization equipment was introduced in order to quit smoking.

The core structure of an electronic cigarette consists of two parts: atomizer + cartridge.

The atomizer is a lithium battery heating device that can generally be used repeatedly;

The cartridge is a consumable device, for comparison

E-cigarettes: nicotine, propylene glycol, glycerin

Tobacco: Nicotine, tar

It can be seen that compared with traditional tobacco, the biggest advantage of e-cigarettes is that they have reduced tar or even no tar.

You should know that tar is the biggest harm of tobacco.

However, tar cannot be removed. In fact, the reason why the former tobacco academician was opposed was that many people believed that his research on "reducing tar in tobacco" was pseudoscience.

Because tar is produced when plants burn, even if they are not tobacco.

Most organic matter will produce tar when it is not completely burned under oxygen-deficient conditions. Coal combustion produces tar, and plant combustion also produces tar. If you have ever cooked with firewood in the countryside, you will know that there is sometimes black oil at the bottom of the pot, which is this stuff.

Therefore, tar is an extremely complex mixture of many hydrocarbons and hydrocarbon oxides, sulfides and nitrides, and is highly carcinogenic, which is the main reason for quitting smoking.

The main harm of nicotine, which is familiar to everyone, is actually its addictiveness. Of course, e-cigarettes will try to alleviate tobacco addiction by gradually reducing nicotine. The current mainstream scientific methods of tobacco withdrawal are either gradual replacement of nicotine or direct neurological drugs.

Again, e-cigarettes are also tobacco

In any case, e-cigarettes are definitely not a fashion or trend, they are tobacco.

According to the Decision on Amendments (Draft for Comments) issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, an article is added to the Appendix as Article 65:

"New tobacco products such as electronic cigarettes shall be implemented in accordance with the relevant provisions of these Regulations on cigarettes."

Therefore, smoking e-cigarettes is no different from smoking tobacco.

Therefore, for those who do not smoke, they must not touch e-cigarettes. For those who are already addicted to smoking, they can gradually reduce their dependence on tobacco through e-cigarettes.

Finally, no matter what, smoking is harmful to your health!

Smoking is harmful to health, which is an official science that cannot be more official. It can be said that this is an event that is difficult to match in human history, both in terms of time span and evidence content. There are also studies that have obtained typical examples from the three major evidences of molecular mechanism, medical evidence and epidemiological investigation. It can be said that no other project can go through hundreds of years of research by countless scientists like tobacco, obtain complete three major evidences, have in-depth popular science, and fight against countless interest groups (a few years ago, tobacco has always been at the top of the economic contribution list, accounting for more than one-tenth of GDP). This can be seen from some of the research papers in my appendix. And according to common sense, if smoking is harmless, how stupid would the tobacco factory be to force the words "smoking is harmful to health" to be written on the cigarette box, and even attach huge disgusting pictures?

Next, let’s discuss the health hazards of smoking from three aspects: molecular mechanisms, medical evidence, and epidemiological surveys.

First, molecular evidence:

1. Smoking causes cancer

The relationship between p53 mutation and smoking and drinking

Note: p53 is a standard tumor suppressor gene, and mutations can cause cancer. Smoking can increase individual p53 mutations, thereby increasing cancer risk.

Reference: Brennan JA, Boyle JO, Koch WM, et al. Association between cigarette smoking and mutation of the p53 gene in squamous-cell carcinoma of the head and neck[J]. New England Journal of Medicine, 1995, 332(11): 712-717.

2. Smoking and lung cancer

The expression of CCL20 in lung cancers. (A–C) The expression of CCL20 in lung cancers was evaluated by real-time PCR (A), Western blot (B), and immunohistochemical (IHC) assays (C). N, normal; T, tumor. (D) Serum concentration of CCL20 in samples from healthy donors (HD), smoker (S) or non-smoker (NS) NSCLCs detected by ELISA.

This is a relatively new literature that describes how smoking induces the chemokine CCL20, thereby promoting lung cancer.

The same species were tested for gene expression, protein expression, immunohistochemistry and serum concentration. It can be seen that CCL20 is significantly increased in smokers. This is new evidence.

References (Wang GZ, Cheng X, Li XC, et al. Tobacco smoke induces production of chemokine CCL20 to promote lung cancer[J]. Cancer letters, 2015, 363(1): 60-70.)

3. Smoking causes sperm changes and is hereditary

cigarette smoke induces specific differences in thespermatozoal microRNAcontent of human smokers compared with non-smokers, and that thesealtered microRNAsappear to predominantly mediate pathways vital for healthy sperm and normal embryo development, particularly cell death and apoptosis

Explanation: Smoking causes changes in male sperm microRNAs, which are essential for sperm health and embryonic development and are involved in cell apoptosis and death pathways. Since male sperm participates in the formation of the next generation, the consequences of smoking will be inherited to the next generation.

Reference: Marczylo EL, Amoako AA, Konje JC, et al. Smoking induces differential miRNA expression in human spermatozoa: a potential transgenerational epigenetic concern?[J]. Epigenetics, 2012, 7(5): 432-439.

Second, medical evidence

Representative light micrographs of lung tissues of mice following subacute (5 days) nose‐only air (control, A and C) or water pipe smoke (WPS, B and D) exposure. Note that the bronchiolar (br) epithelium of the lung of mice exposed to WPS is (1.5 fold) shorter compared with control (short arrows). al, alveolus.

Nemmar A, Al Hemeiri A, Al Hammadi N, et al. Early pulmonary events of nose‐only water pipe (shisha) smoking exposure in mice[J]. Physiological reports, 2015, 3(3): e12258.

This section describes an experiment using mouse lungs, with air control on the left and smoke on the right. You can see the changes in the mentality of epidermal cells. (ps: I deleted a picture here because I couldn't stand the endless explanation.)

Some people always think they have grasped the truth after reading a few words. Everyone knows that adult lungs are black, but the picture I attached clearly shows that it is the lungs of teenagers, but they still fail to notice this core detail. So they deleted the picture.

If you are interested, you can watch various videos where you can smoke your lungs with smoke. This evidence is too obvious and too simple.

So, you can never wake up a person who is pretending to be asleep.

Third, epidemiological evidence

Tobacco kills nearly 6 million people each year, and 90% of the annual 1.59 million lung cancer deaths worldwide are caused by cigarette smoke. This sentence comes from a document. Smoking kills 6 million people each year, and 90% of the annual 1.59 million lung cancer deaths worldwide are caused by smoking. The World Health Organization has a special webpage to introduce smoking cessation WHO | Tobacco and publishes survey results every year, WHO report on the global tobacco epidemic, which can be consulted for free.

Currently, as a routine data, countries have been publishing these data.

China also publishes the data, which is published annually by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Every year, more than 1 million people die from tobacco-related diseases in China.

Society and Policy The General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council issued the "Notice on Leading Cadres Taking the Lead in Banning Smoking in Public Places" on December 29, 2013. The second question is about the harm of secondhand smoke and firsthand smoke. There is no evidence that non-smokers are more threatened than smokers. Some scholars believe that the possible reason for the harm of secondhand smoke is that the combustion of sidestream smoke is lower than that of mainstream smoke. The proportion of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a carcinogen produced by incomplete combustion, is indeed high, and there is some experimental evidence. But!!! At present, the academic community mainly uses animal models to study the carcinogenic effect of smoke. So far, some researchers have found that under the premise of the same total particulate matter, the health indicators of mice in sidestream smoke are more affected. Some researchers believe that the incidence of lung cancer in rats exposed to mainstream smoke is significantly higher, but the experimental results on rabbits and dogs are not significantly different! There is no epidemiological survey data to support this conclusion! In addition, it is rogue to talk about toxicity without considering the dose. If you breathe the same amount of secondhand smoke and firsthand smoke, without filters and incompletely burned smoke, think about it yourself.

However, this does not mean that there is no harm

WHO strongly recommends pregnant women to avoid tobacco harm, pointing out that tobacco use during pregnancy, including smokeless tobacco use, increases the risk of serious pregnancy outcomes such as miscarriage, stillbirth, ectopic pregnancy and premature birth. Babies born to women who smoke during pregnancy are more likely to be born prematurely and have low birth weight (less than 2500 grams) (WHO | WHO recommendations for the prevention and management of tobacco use and second-hand smoke exposure in pregnancy).

Literature, randomly selected, from 1902 to 2016

Silagy C, Stead L F. Physician advice for smoking cessation (Cochrane Review)[J]. The Cochrane Library, 1902, 2.

Lampson R S. A quantitative study of the vasoconstriction induced by smoking[J]. Journal of the American Medical Association, 1935, 104(22): 1963-1966.

Levin ML, Goldstein H, Gerhardt P R. Cancer and tobacco smoking: a preliminary report[J]. Journal of the American Medical Association, 1950, 143(4): 336-338.

Phillips DH, Hewer A, Martin CN, et al. Correlation of DNA adduct levels in human lung with cigarette smoking[J]. Nature, 1988, 336(6201): 790-792.

Asami S, Manabe H, Miyake J, et al. Cigarette smoking induces an increase in oxidative DNA damage, 8-hydroxydeoxyguanosine, in a central site of the human lung[J]. Carcinogenesis, 1997, 18(9): 1763-1766.

Lee SH, Goswami S, Grudo A, et al. Antielastin autoimmunity in tobacco smoking–induced emphysema[J]. Nature medicine, 2007, 13(5): 567-569.

Mariani T J. Respiratory disorders: Ironing out smoking-related airway disease[J]. Nature, 2016.