HNB study ‘misleading’

Konstantinos Farsalinos raised his concerns on his blog about an American Heart Association (AHA) study on heat-not-burn (HNB) technology, which Farsalinos argues is creating unnecessary alarm due to critical information being left out of the study’s abstract.

The AHA study exposed mice to aerosol emitted by Philip Morris International’s iQOS HNB device, and claimed that this aerosol had the same negative effects on “flow-mediated dilatation” (FMD), as cigarette smoke.

Farsalinos highlighted that the study subjects were exposed to unequal levels of HNB aerosol and cigarette smoke with iQOS delivering 4.5 times more nicotine to the mice compared with cigarettes.

“In conclusion, the study found that iQOS has the same acute adverse effect on FMD as cigarettes when delivering 4.5 times higher amount of nicotine compared to the tobacco cigarette. This should have been the study conclusion, but this information was not even mentioned in the abstract (however, it was presented in the poster),” Farsalinos wrote.