A new study, funded by British American Tobacco, has found that vaping is not as damaging to your genes as smoking cigarettes.
Testing their first e-cig brand, Vype, the company’s team of scientists compared the effects of vaping on a person’s DNA, with the effects of smoking.
They found that inhaling the same or more nicotine from an e-cigarette causes “very little” changes to our genes compared to regular smoking.
Using a 3D model of a human airway, the scientists exposed the tissue to e-cigarette vapor and cigarette smoke, continuously for an hour in each test.
They tested two different doses of vapor, with one level matching the nicotine in cigarette smoke and the second dose containing double the amount of nicotine, reaching cells in the airway.
The scientists mapped those that were “switched on and off” at 24 hours and 48 hours, after the one-hour exposure to measure the effect on genes.
They found 873 and 205 genes were affected after 24 and 48 hours respectively in the tissue exposed to cigarette smoke, and just three and one in the tissue exposed to e-cig vapor.
The cigarette smoke caused changes to genes involved in the development of lung cancer, inflammation and fibrosis, while e-cig vapor only caused minor changes to genes involved in cell metabolism and oxidative stress processes.
“Our results clearly show that cigarette smoke has an adverse effect on cells, triggering a robust gene expression response,” said Dr James Murphy, head of reduced risk substantiation at British American Tobacco.
“However, even at equivalent or higher dose of nicotine, acute exposure to the test e-cigarette vapor has very limited impact on gene expression compared to cigarette smoke exposure – it’s a striking difference.”
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