New Zealand researchers are working to find out the long-term health effects of vaping on the nation’s youth, who are nearly three times more likely to vape than teenagers in Australia, Canada, and the United States. And while preliminary research is causing concerns, they admit that concrete conclusions are still years away.
Kelly Burrows, a researcher at Auckland University’s Bio Engineering Institute, began looking into the matter in 2019 when data suggested that cigarette use was declining but vape use was increasing drastically.
“You know it took sort of 50 years to find out what the link between smoking and health effects really were,” she said. “I would say because vaping has not been around that long, comparatively, it’ll be at least another 10 years or 20 years before we see the long-term health effects.”
During the past six years, the associate professor led multiple studies on the topic, focusing on the lungs and respiratory system.
“Every time you vape, some of that will stay inside your lungs, so the e-liquids that are in vapes are sort of quite an oily substance,” Burrows said. “There’ll be a lining of this oil that will stay inside your lungs and actually one of the things that is designed to get rid of that is the process of inflammation. It’s when you have this inflammation occurring many times a day over many years, which is what leads to disease and tissue breakdown.”
Burrows worked with engineering students to create a vaping robot, which collected vapor and froze it to be tested for chemicals and contaminants. That method found at least 30 different flavoring chemicals in each e-liquid, and Burrows said no one knows what the health and safety of those flavoring chemicals is. They also found some heavy metals in the aerosol—the substance that is inhaled and exhaled from a vaping device.
“So normally the heating coil is made from a mixture of different metals and when that gets to really high temperatures, some of that comes off into the aerosol.”
Another study from Burrows grew lung cells in a lab and exposed them to e-cigarette vapor, where some cells died and others broke apart or became more permeable, meaning chemicals could be more easily absorbed into the bloodstream.
