My personal take is that vaping is probably not good for you (but far better than smoking). Nicotine itself is a powerful agent, with some harmful and somebeneficial effects (for example, the vascular disease associated with smoking is primarily due to nicotine).
I think that a lot of “vape hate” is a kind of backlash from an emboldened public that until recently has had to put up with smoking forever in all kinds of venues whether they liked it or not; they don’t want any back-sliding, nor due they want any more second-hand exposures due to other people’s vices/pleasures.
I should clarify and say that I think that even without nicotine, vaping is probably not harmless. Your lungs are fairly delicate as organs go and does not in general like being exposed to “stuff”. There are legions of lung diseases caused by one inhalant or another.
However, I do believe that we will learn a lot about what is safe and what is unsafe to inhale from vape-ers over the next decade or so. I wouldn’t volunteer for that myself…
Ah, the good old days when you could buy Black Leaf 40 to kill nasty plant-eating bugs. I quit using it, partly because of the epic warnings on the label (“may be fatal if inhaled” kind of sticks in your mind).
As noted, concerns about e-cigs go far beyond addiction and cardiovascular effects of nicotine. Vapers (or the preferred term, vapids) are guinea pigs for the long-term lung effects of aldehydes and other chemicals inhaled in the course of e-cig usage.
Pulmonologists and specialists in pulmonary pathology should have plenty of work in years to come.
The vapors from e-cigs may be somewhat harmful but nicotine itself has the potential to be good for you. discovermagazine.com/2014/march/13-nicotine-fix . The main harmful effects of nicotine are similar to caffeine, high blood pressure and the like. So you choose your poison. Lower risk of Parkinson’s and dementia with nicotine, but a higher risk of stroke, heart problems and problems for people with diabetes. Like most drugs, there are benefits and harmful effects.
I wouldn’t be too sure that nicotine protects against dementia.
A recent systematic review found a 70% higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease in those with a smoking history, and found evidence that pure nicotine may play a role in that elevated risk.
“The in vitro and animal and literature clearly demonstrates a causal relationship between OxS (oxidative stress); cigarette smoke/condensate, nicotine, and increased proinflammatory cytokines (via activation of immune cells, microglia and astrocytes) promote high concentrations of ROS and RNS (reactive oxygen and nitrogen species) and other oxidants. Animal models also showed cigarette smoke and nicotine exposure was causally linked to significant cerebral anti-oxidant depletion. The factors promoting cerebral OxS and antioxidant depletion in animal models are hypothesized to be operational, in vivo, in the human brain132, 151, 168, 177 and evidence of free radical-mediated damage was demonstrated post-mortem in the human brain.177 Taken together, the existing literature indicates that smoking and pure nicotine: a) serves as an exogenous source of high concentrations of ROS, RNS, and other oxidizing compounds; b) up-regulates activity and release of proinflammatory cytokines by peripheral and central nervous systems, which promotes immune system-mediated discharge of additional free radicals and oxidizing compounds; c) depletes enzyme-and-non-enzyme-based antioxidants secondary to increased demand for the chemical reduction of high radical concentrations (from cigarette smoke and proinflammatory cytokine signaling), and inhibits the production of glutathione, the primary antioxidant in the human brain. The combination of these conditions serves to place the brain and other organ systems of smokers under a state of chronic OxS. Importantly, OxS is associated with increased β-secretase cleavage of APP as well as tau phosphorylation; therefore, smoking-related OxS may serve as a fundamental mechanism initiating the AD-pathophysiological process promoting increased risk for the development of AD.”
The nicotine-based oxidative stress evidence appears to be heavily based on rat studies. So how about the human brain? We’ll probably know more in years to come, along with evidence of dementia incidence in e-cig users.
On the other side there is some evidence that while usually nicotine isn’t considered much of a carcinogen in and of itself, that may not be the case especially for those with certain gene mutations:
This may be only tangentially related to the question, since these are unusual cases by definition, however, there are case reports of deaths from nicotine poisoning. Industrial exposure is more common than exposure through use of e-cig fluid, but e-cig fluids have been implicated in survivable accidental poisonings by children, and in suicide attempts that resulted in three deaths of eight known cases:
Note especially that the concentrations in the e-cig product under section 3.1.10 is not the correct information to determine a lethal dose (or one for causing chronic illness,) that is typically reported as a weight/(weight of human subject) or (volume [implied pure product])/(weight of human subject) - average e-cig users should be nowhere near the lethal dosages in the suicide attempts - these are people who disregarded the typical use of the product and injected or drank the fluid directly.