Vaping has received a lot of attention this year for a variety of risks, and the news only gets worse. Recent research shows an increased risk of e-cigarette lung damage associated with vaping, including issues like asthma, bronchitis, emphysema, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

Researchers at the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, studied data on the use of cigarettes and e-cigarettes in tens of thousands of U.S. adults. None of these adults had been diagnosed with lung disease when the study began, and researchers recorded new diagnoses with lung disease between 2013 and 2016.

“What we found is that for e-cigarette users, the odds of developing lung disease increased by about a third, even after controlling for their tobacco use and their clinical and demographic information,” said the study’s senior author, Stanton Glantz, who directs the Center for Tobacco Control Research.

Those included in the study were diagnosed with a slew of common lung diseases, including asthma, bronchitis, emphysema, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)

Researchers noted that this risk of e-cigarette lung damage was increased if vapers also smoked tobacco. However, e-cigarette usage definitely contributed to this increased risk, researchers found.

Is E-cigarette Use Harmful Even If I Don’t Smoke Regular Cigarettes?

“We concluded that e-cigarettes are harmful on their own, and the effects are independent of smoking conventional tobacco,” said Glantz in a UCSF news release.

The study found that those who use e-cigarettes (either currently or formerly) were 30 percent more likely to be diagnosed with chronic lung disease. The risk for traditional tobacco smokers, by contrast, was more than 2.6 times increased. People who both vaped and smoked faced a more than triply increased risk.

“Dual users—the most common use pattern among people who use e-cigarettes—get the combined risk of e-cigarettes and conventional cigarettes, so they’re actually worse off than tobacco smokers,” said Glantz.

This is particularly significant, as e-cigarettes are often marketed and used as a method for smokers of weaning of traditional tobacco use. These findings suggest, however, that the dual usage of e-cigarettes and traditional cigarettes may not offer the harm reduction these users hope for.

“Switching from conventional cigarettes to e-cigarettes exclusively could reduce the risk of lung disease, but very few people do it,” said Glantz. “For most smokers, they simply add e-cigarettes and become dual users, significantly increasing their risk of developing lung disease above just smoking.”

While the nature of this study can only show associations between e-cigarette use and subsequent lung disease diagnoses, rather than substantively prove cause and effect, the numbers linked with this correlation are significant.

These findings were published Dec. 16, 2019, in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Earlier this year, e-cigarette usage has been highly publicized for being linked with thousands of cases of acute lung disease, leading to hospitalization and even death. Researchers involved in this study noted that these findings are unrelated, as they are looking at more the long-term effects of e-cigarette use, rather than the sudden onset disease linked with these other cases. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that as of Dec. 17, 2019, 2,506 hospitalized e-cigarette, or vaping, product use-associated lung injury (EVALI) cases have been reported in the United States.