Tag: vape pen
Survey finds teens unaware they are vaping nicotine
“Many of our participants were unaware of the nicotine content of the e-cigarette products they were using,” said researcher Dr. Rachel Boykan.
Article via UPI.com
As e-cigarette use soars in high schools across America, new research shows many people don’t understand the amount of addictive nicotine they’re inhaling with every puff.
In a new survey, many teens said they regularly used e-cigarettes, but swore they only vaped nicotine-free products.
However, urine tests for a “marker” of nicotine use came up positive 40 percent of the time in this same group of vapers, the researchers reported.
“Many of our participants were unaware of the nicotine content of the e-cigarette products they were using,” concluded a team led by Dr. Rachel Boykan, a pediatrics researcher at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, N.Y.
That could mean even more lifelong nicotine addictions arising in the young, including many who already believe vaping to be “harmless” compared to traditional smoking, experts said.
Patricia Folan directs the Center for Tobacco Control at Northwell Health in Great Neck, N.Y. She said, “Other studies have revealed that one of the main reasons adolescents use e-cigarettes is that they perceive them to be less harmful than combustible cigarettes — without full knowledge of their actual contents.”
But the new study “shows that many of the participating youth were unaware of the nicotine content in their vaping devices,” Folan said.
The study findings were published online April 22 in the journal Pediatrics.
As Boykan’s group noted, about one in five high school students now say they’ve used an e-cigarette at least once over the past month, and in just the 12 months between 2017 and 2018, teen vaping rates soared 78 percent.
But do young people even understand the addictive dangers of nicotine-laden vaping products such as Juul vape “pods”?
To find out, the Stony Brook team first had 517 people, aged 12 to 21, complete questionnaires about their use of e-cigarettes, traditional cigarettes and marijuana. The investigators then compared those survey results against the results of urine tests that looked for a chemical called cotinine.
Cotinine is a well-known “marker” for the presence of nicotine in a person’s body.
Overall, the survey participants were largely honest about their use of tobacco, e-cigarettes and marijuana: Only about 2 percent who said they didn’t use those substances later were found to have evidence of tobacco, nicotine or pot in their urine samples.
The big discrepancy came among young vapers, Boykan’s team found.
In this subgroup, about four of every 10 people who said they vaped non-nicotine products only were found to have markers for nicotine in their urine.
In many cases, this lack of awareness occurred with use of Juul vaping pods, which actually “have the highest nicotine concentrations to date,” the researchers reported.
These products have also “become the most widely used [vaping] products among adolescents,” the study authors added.
“The risk for addiction is clear,” said Dr. Len Horovitz, a lung health specialist who wasn’t involved in the new study. The fact that many young vapers may not even realize that they are ingesting nicotine is “disturbing,” he said.
“It’s well known that e-cigarettes end up delivering more nicotine because every ‘draw’ yields nicotine, whereas traditional cigarettes burn down between puffs and therefore deliver less nicotine,” Horovitz said. He works in pulmonary care at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.
For her part, Folan believes more must be done to alert kids to the danger.
“This study demonstrates the need for more regulation regarding e-cigarettes, including labeling of ingredients and health warnings,” she said. Better education about what’s in a vaping product “may help teens make more educated decisions,” Folan added.
FDA Barges In on Vape Maker Juul, Seizes ‘Thousands’ of Documents
In its ongoing crusade against rad teens, the Food and Drug Administration announced Tuesday that it made a surprise inspection of the headquarters of Juul Labs, which is under investigation for potentially marketing e-cigarettes to children. The “unannounced on-site inspection,” executed on Friday, resulted in the seizure of “thousands of pages of documents,” according to the FDA.
The surprise inspection of Juul continues an aggressive new chapter in the FDA’s war on the “epidemic” of underage vaping, as FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb recently put it. The agency has cracked down on e-cigarette businesses in general and Juul in particular.
“The JUUL inspection, which we completed on Friday, sought further documentation related to JUUL’s sales and marketing practices, among other things, and resulted in the collection of over a thousand pages of documents,” the FDA said in a statement emailed to Gizmodo. “The inspection followed the Agency’s request for information that we issued to JUUL Labs in April for documents that would help us to better understand the reportedly high rates of youth use and the youth appeal of JUUL products, including documents related to marketing and product design.”
In a statement emailed to Gizmodo, Juul CEO Kevin Burns said his company plans to work with the FDA and other parties to prevent underage vaping and characterized the FDA’s surprise inspection on its headquarters as a “meeting.”
“We are committed to preventing underage use, and we want to engage with FDA, lawmakers, public health advocates and others to keep JUUL out of the hands of young people. The meetings last week with FDA gave us the opportunity to provide information about our business from our marketing practices to our industry-leading online age-verification protocols to our youth prevention efforts. It was a constructive and transparent dialogue,” Burns said. “We’ve now released over 50,000 pages of documents to the FDA since April that support our public statements. We look forward to presenting our plan to address youth access in the 60-day time frame as outlined by FDA. We want to be part of the solution in preventing underage use, and we believe it will take industry and regulators working together to restrict youth access.”
While there are hundreds of e-cigarettes on the market, Juul remains the most popular, especially among teenagers, according to Nielsen, which found that Juul represented nearly 55 percent of the e-cigarette retail market as of March.
In late August, the New York Times reported that management within PAX Labs, which created Juul before it spun off into its own company, knew the company’s e-cigarettes were widely popular with teenagers and still failed to tweak its marketing strategy, according to a former senior manager at PAX. Last month, the FDA announced that it had issued 1,300 “warning letters” and fines to brick-and-mortar e-cigarette retailers that the agency said it had busted selling Juul vapes to minors during an “undercover blitz” carried out this summer.
Although e-cigarettes are believed to be somewhat safer than tobacco cigarettes, and users can vape without nicotine, evidence shows they are still not safe, particularly for teens’ still-developing brains.
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