Studies Misrepresent Disease Risk

Analysis from the journal of Internal and Emergency Medicine has found that studies linking nicotine vaping to assorted smoking-related diseases ignored that the diseases already existed prior to switching. This isn’t the first time this has happened as a famous piece of research previously claimed vaping caused heart attacks – but had to be withdrawn when critics pointed out that the heart attacks had occurred up to ten years before smokers switched to vaping.

In a new piece of research published in Internal and Emergency Medicine, Dr Brad Rodu looked at published papers claiming that vaping caused health problems and tried to see if he could replicate their findings.

He said: “Over the past few years, many studies have used cross-sectional data from the National Health Interview Survey, the Behavioural Risk Factor Surveillance Survey, and the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health Survey to claim that e-cigarette use is associated with asthma chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), emphysema, chronic bronchitis, stroke, congestive heart disease myocardial infarction (MI), pre-diabetes and hypertension.”

The problem Dr Rodu identifies is that the claims use databases that show “when smokers and vapers started, and when they were diagnosed with diseases”, but has been “ignored”.

Rather than being able to produce the same findings as the studies he was looking at, Dr Rodu discovered: “This evidence indicates a potential reverse association between e-cigarette use and these diseases.”

He found a common theme, that smokers became ill and received a diagnosis. Then, the evidence says, they switched to vaping and reduced their risk or the severity of their condition.

A common anecdotal theme on social media forums has been for vapers to talk about how switching from smoking to vaping helped them reduce the severity of their COPD symptoms. One, on Twitter, took to posting pictures of him running up mountains to emphasise the point.

Dr Rodu said that studies making claims of vaping causing COPD, emphysema, chronic bronchitis, stroke, or heart attacks are “exaggerating” the link to vaping “and are simply unreliable”.

Commenting on his work, Doctors Riccardo Polosa and Konstantinos Farsalinos said that the controversy that surrounds vaping is fuelled by the types of studies Dr Rodu looked at, adding they are “often poorly designed, conducted, and interpreted”.

They said Rodu’s findings demonstrated that the list of diseases “were only rarely diagnosed” in vapers following their switch to vaping.

The pair ask a very important question: “How was it possible that the peer review process at highly respected scientific Journals has failed to detect such fatal flaws and has allowed publication of low-quality papers lacking inclusion of such key factors essential for the interpretation of their analysis?”

They say the findings show it is vital that researchers, politicians, and the media always bear in mind that association should not always be interpreted as causation.