United States: Vaping can harm your body’s circulation right away, even if the vape doesn’t contain nicotine, according to a new study.
Although many people think vaping is safer than smoking, the study shows that it can still have a big impact on your blood vessels and might reduce how much oxygen your lungs can take in.
So, even without nicotine, vaping can still cause serious harm to your health.
As reported by the Nypost.com, the vascular system is the number of vessels that transported the blood and the lymph fluid round the body. Vapes, otherwise known as e-cigarettes, have far fewer chemical compounds than are present in the smoke produced by conventional cigarettes.
For this reason, for many a social activity is believed to be less dangerous than cigarette smoking. The vapes also exist in many flavors and therefore are a favorite to many youngsters.
But the new research, which will be revealed in the meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in Chicago next week, is the recent work establishing they are harmful to health.
“E-cigarettes have for instance been widely promoted as safer than conventional tobacco smoking,” said the study’s first author Dr Marianne Nabbout of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock.
“Some think that there are not even any of the dangerous substances, including free radicals, which are present in regular tobacco cigarettes since there is no burning”.
As much as vaping poses fewer toxic chemicals when compared to smoking cigarettes Nabbout notes that is actually poses a danger to vascular health and overall well-being.
In the study done at the University of Pennsylvania Nabbout and her colleagues aimed to determine the effects of cigarette smokers on vascular function and the effects of vapers by using e-cigarettes with and without nicotine.
A total of 31 healthy smokers and vapers; both male and female, aged between 21 to 49 years were recruited to date.
Over three separate sessions, the participants underwent two MRI exams, one before and one after smoking/vaping episodes: Tobacco cigarette, e-cigarette aerosol containing nicotine and e-cigarette aerosol not containing nicotine.
Again, a cuff was placed around the upper part of the thigh to occlude arterial blood supply.
Once deflated, femoral artery flow velocity which is a measure of the speed of the blood flow in the femoral artery and venous oxygen saturation which s a measure of the amount of the oxygen in the blood that returns to the heart after supplying oxygen to the body’s tissues that were assessed.
Also, blood flow in the brain was also measured with the special kind of the MRI called phase-contrast MRI also the data of the smokers there was a significant decrease in the resting blood flow velocity in the superficial femoral artery and also which hereby runs along the thigh and supplies oxygenated blood the entire lower body.