How Electronic Cigarettes Affect Your Lungs: Results of an Online Survey of Users
How Electronic Cigarettes Affect Your Lungs: Results of an Online Survey of Users
If you trawl the net, you’ll find there’s little data on how ecigarettes effect your lungs.
So, with some help from researcher Paul Bergen and vaping bloggers (and from lots of you lovely readers!) I asked vapers how switching to electronic cigarettes had affected their smoker’s cough, ability to exercise and do strenuous jobs and lung capacity.
I’m leaving the detailed analysis to scientist and researcher Dr Konstantinos Farsalinos, who has generously agreed to analyse the results without requesting any payment, but thought you might to look at a summary of the results.
Update: Read Dr Farsalinos’ analysis here.
Chart 1: How Long Have People Been Using Electronic Cigarettes?
We asked:
How long have you been using electronic cigarettes:
Obviously, the less time you have been vaping the less likely it is to have any effect on your health.
It’s interesting, though, that nearly 40% of those surveyed have been vaping for more than a year. That’s very different from the survey we carried out with the University of Alberta in 2009, when most vapers had only been using electronic cigarettes for a short period of time.
Chart 2: Change In Smoking Habits After Switching To Ecigs.
We asked:
Which of the following is true:
After switching to ecigs, you smoked fewer tobacco cigarettes (or stopped smoking tobacco altogether). After switching to ecigs, you smoked more tobacco cigarettes. You didn’t smoke before using ecigs.
Although the survey is focussed on health improvements, it’s heartening to see only 4 people claimed they smoked more after switching to ecigs. I was surprised, though, to see 17 people who hadn’t smoked before starting to use e-cigarettes.
Chart 3: Vaping v. Smoking
We asked:
Do you:
vape daily and only vape vape mostly with the occasional or rare cigarette still smoke, but vape more than you smoke still smoke, and smoke more than you vape
This question is important, because we need to see if any health improvements are greater among people who only use electronic cigarettes. (I am going to leave the cross analysis to Dr Farsalinos, though!)
Again, it’s not the focus of the survey, but it’s good to see that 77% have stopped using tobacco cigarettes entirely, and 15% only have the occasional cigarette.
Chart 4 Smoker’s Cough After Switching
We asked:
If you had a recurring cough before switching to electronic cigarettes:
is the cough worse? is the cough unchanged? has the cough got better or disappeared? question not applicable
The results were clear: almost two thirds (63.9%) felt that their smoker’s cough was better after switching to ecigarettes. Less than 3.4% felt that the cough was worse or unchanged.
Chart 5: Ability to Exercise After Switching To Vaping
We asked:
Has your ability to exercise:
got worse improved stayed the same question not applicable
Great news if you like sport – 72.9% of vapers reported an improved ability to exercise after switching.
Chart 6: Ability to Do Strenuous Jobs After Switching to Vaping
We asked:
Has your ability to do strenuous jobs (e.g. gardening, lifting, housework e.t.c.):
got worse got better stayed the same question not applicable
Of course, some people don’t exercise – but nearly all of us have to do housework. So we wanted to know how vapers’ ability to do tiring jobs had changed.
Over 66% of vapers had experienced an improvement in ability to do strenuous jobs, although this did not match the number of people who reported an improvement in the ability to exercise.
Chart 7: Lung Capacity After Switching to Electronic Cigarettes
We asked:
If you are aware of your lung capacity, has it:
got worse improved stayed the same question not applicable
The aim of the survey was to work out what the effect of electronic cigarettes on the lungs were, so this was the most important question! The results were amazing – over 70% reported an improvement in lung capacity.
Chart 8: Were Changes in Lung Capacity Confirmed by a Doctor?
We asked:
Have changes in lung capacity been confirmed by a doctor:
yes no question not applicable
Assessing your change in lung capacity is a more subjective question than most of the questions here.
But from conversations with vapers I know some have had their lung capacity measured, usually because of existing health problems.
22.2% of the vapers told us that changes in lung capacity had been confirmed by a doctor, which I hope will be useful when assessing the validity of the results.
(Fewer people answered this question, as we used skip logic so that people who had answered not applicable to the question eight jumped to the end of the survey.)
Potential Problems With This Survey:
Of course, as Professor Carl Philips recently pointed out, all open surveys have problems. I am sure Dr Konstantinos will point out more, but to my mind some of the biggest problems with this survey are:
1. As participants were recruited by social media, vaping forums and blogs, many participants are likely to be enthusiastic vapers which may lead to bias in subjective questions.
2. At the same time, there is also a danger that:
those who don’t like vaping will deliberately answer questions to throw vaping in a negative light people may misread the questions, especially if they are completing the survey in a hurry3. Ideally, this study would be carried out by a University or a Doctor – the only reason we did it was because the data was simply not out there.
Nevertheless, the results are fascinating, back up anecdotal evidence – and hopefully will inspire further research.
Source: http://www.ecigarettedirect.co.uk/ashtray-blog/2013/04/how-electronic-cigarettes-affect-lungs.html
