Politics

Why we don't know much about e-cigarettes

The long-term impacts of e-cigarette use are hotly debated

August 19, 2015
Could e-cigarettes stop people smoking these? © Chris Radburn/PA Wire/Press Association Images
Could e-cigarettes stop people smoking these? © Chris Radburn/PA Wire/Press Association Images
Public Health England has made headlines by formally acknowledging in a report that e-cigarettes are safer than conventional cigarettes, and saying that they could help smokers to quit. 

But the overall tone of the report is cautious, and, in backing the announcement, the government's Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies warned that “there continues to be a lack of evidence on the long-term use of e-cigarettes.” The debate around e-cigarettes is heated; while there seems to be little if any evidence of short-term harm, and while many people think they could help smokers quit, others worry about unknown health problems they might cause, or question whether they actually help anyone to stop smoking. It's all very confusing

Here's some reasons why we don't really know very much at all about this controversial technology:

As many as one in three e-cigarette studies have a conflict of interest. According to a review of the evidence conducted at the end of last year, 34 per cent of studies into the heath effects of e-cigarettes were authored by people who declared a conflict of interest. That could raise fears of bias. The same review found that the findings of the 76 studies it looked at were often contradictory.

We don't know what using e-cigarettes daily could eventually do to you. "The most worrying aspect of e-cigarettes is that we do not know the long-term health consequences of daily use," the author of one review told Vox this spring, "Will e-cigarette users come up with unsuspected diseases such as cancers in 10 or 20 years from the start of use 10 years ago?"

"E-cigarette" is quite a broad term. An American Heart Association briefing which runs through all potentially harmful materials found in e-cigarettes shows what a range of substances might or might not be included in a specific brand of e-cigarette. Nictoine, Tobacco alkaloids and a range of metals (the effects of regularly inhaling which are not known) are, it says, found in some but not all models.

It took a long time for many people to realise that smoking itself was dangerous. The journey from early warnings about the link between smoking and lung cancer to mainstream scientific acceptance took up much of the early-mid 20th century. It's understandable, then, that many remain cautious about this new technology despite a lack of obvious early warnings that it is dangerous.