On the corners of youth cafés in the heart of your city, you will notice an unmistakable scene. Instead of the image we were used to previously, with limited elements in the scene (hookah - cigarette - and coffee or tea), an element that arouses strangeness and curiosity is increasing in the scene, as cigarettes or electronic hookah rise It has been evaporated from the mouths of many young people, and in recent years it has turned into a behavioral fashion that spreads in circles very quickly.

Talking about electronic cigarettes begins with an important question about the danger of regular cigarettes, as you know, regular cigarettes burn tobacco (Tobacco), which is a paid killer (1) linked to the death of millions of people every year according to the World Health Organization reports, in addition to its ability to raise the odds of a person’s death The normal, in the life stages before sixty and seventy, to three times. The problem with tobacco here - as it is promoted - is that it does not only give you nicotine while burning it, but it gives you a full meal of carcinogens (2), such as formaldehyde, lead, cyanide, ammonia, benzene, and even uranium in some cases as a result of types of fertilizers that It is added to the soil during the cultivation of the tobacco plant, in addition to the byproducts of not completely burning these components.

For many years, the attack on cigarettes took several doors, but the most important of them was the attack on tobacco and its problems related to the additional components of nicotine, the main goal of burning tobacco, and no one knew that this would open the door, in 2003, in the Chinese markets first, then the whole world, for a type of tobacco. A new type of cigarette, called e-cigarettes, marketed itself as a "safe alternative" to regular cigarettes, because e-cigarettes do not burn tobacco, but rather provide you with pure nicotine, which this simple machine converts to vapor that you can inhale, thus began a new type of industry, developed Her tools day after day, and as usual I had different pictures, sizes and flavors on demand.

But... are e-cigarettes really safer?

This is not, in fact, what a study (3) published a few hours ago, led by Dr. Hyun Long Lee of the Department of Environmental Medicine, colleagues from the same department, and the Department of Urology, New York University School of Medicine, in the famous scientific journal(4) PNAS, short for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a specialized publication of the National Academy of Sciences Which indicates that despite the fact that e-cigarettes contain nicotine free of carcinogens, they may cause damage to the DNA of very sensitive areas of our bodies, which are the heart, lung, and kidneys.

The idea of ​​the experiments was to expose mice (5) to electronic cigarettes for 12 weeks, at a rate of doses that vary in quantity and quality to be similar to what happens to the average person during 10 years, and here the results came to say that there are substantial proportions of compounds that cause DNA damage have been present in degrees It varies in the heart, lung, and bladder, and its presence in the lung was three to eight times higher than in the heart and bladder, but what does it mean that there are substances that reduce our DNA repair activity or the amounts of protein that do this process?

cancer; In fact, this type of activity allows mutations in the DNA to occur, and with low rates of repair, those mutations accumulate little by little, which makes fertile ground for the carcinogenic effect, but at that point let us clarify that 80% of nicotine itself, the main substance in the components of electronic cigarettes, It turns when it enters the body into “cotinine”, which is a non-carcinogenic or toxic substance, but a small amount of nicotine (less than 10%) is converted inside the body to nitrosamines, which in turn cause strong and proven cancerous activity in experimental animals, so nicotine itself does not It directly affects our DNA, but nitrosamines do so.

In addition, through another group of those experiments (6), in the same study, it was shown that some of the nicotine metabolites have the same direct carcinogenic effect on epithelial cells isolated from the bladder, heart, and lung of mice, and others from the lung and bladder. Not only did these products play the role of "auxiliary materials" in causing mutations in DNA, but also caused the rates of random mutations to be raised two to three times compared to standard compounds that cause these mutations, such as ultraviolet radiation, which means degrees of Double risk.

carcinogenic questions

On the other hand, the degree of safety of electronic cigarettes is not yet known, especially with long-term use. We are facing a relatively new product that has not received sufficient research. For example, some studies (7), which find criticism as well, indicate that the special battery voltage E-cigarettes and their different conductivity may strongly affect the safety of the device in your hands, as this may cause an increase in formaldehyde levels, which are also carcinogenic, as well as propylene glycol (8), the solvent in which nicotine is placed in an electronic cigarette is also in doubt. In this field of research, despite its relative safety, add to this the extreme degrees of diversity in e-cigarette models and the difference in the materials used in their composition, both in terms of type and quality, and you may understand the problems facing the research scope related to the device only.

On the other hand, the reports of the World Health Organization issued (9) in 2014 indicate that the surveys that talk about the ability of electronic cigarettes to help some smokers to quit smoking, find themselves a limited place with which we cannot reach definite results, if they help cigarette smokers Indeed, in giving up the usual tobacco cigarettes to an electronic one, but the electronic becomes your new cigarette, and the idea here is that some doctors may use it as a transitional stage during treatment, but by gradually reducing nicotine doses, which is the same effect that occurs when doctors use nicotine stickers or in The chewable picture for a gradual decline in its use, but the use of these forms of nicotine without a medical plan, were e-cigarettes, chewable tablets, or patches, was not a solution.

The crisis we face when we talk about electronic cigarettes is related to general health, although some classify electronic cigarettes as less harmful;

Because it contains only nicotine, with its known harms, the problem basically lies within a different scope, for example, cigarette ads were banned in many countries a long time ago, but e-cigarettes are finding themselves a new marketing place as a “some form” of Forms of smoking addiction treatment on TV and on the Internet, so there is a greater opportunity for a larger market of its own, I mean it may not reduce the number of smokers, on the contrary, it may increase their number.

What is the real problem?

One of the most important reasons for the spread of electronic cigarettes is that they are a "contemporary fashion" that takes a variety of very elegant forms (Reuters)

This is because popular culture has begun to take a position hostile to regular cigarettes, while e-cigarettes are included in this range as one of the tools for that state of hostility, they are entered as a "treatment" or a "safe alternative", which raises the percentage of non-smokers who try it, as well as - And it is the most dangerous - it raises the degrees of acceptance among young adolescents or even those below that age. For example, we find that the number of American teenagers coming to it (10) has doubled in a few years to reach 16% of secondary school students, while the main problem lies in each The types of smoking are in the psychological addiction to nicotine itself, so these new cigarettes are more dangerous than the previous ones, but with what they promote about themselves.

Add to this that one of the most important reasons for the spread of electronic cigarettes is that they are a "contemporary fashion", which takes a variety of forms of elegance and diversity, suitable for each age group according to its taste, so it has become like your mobile phone, which you carry with you, showing your elegance, as well as the sight of this amount of smoke, which is very thick compared to With regular cigarettes, the attention of young groups is drawn to trying it and enjoying the elegance of puffing smoke, and this is a new phenomenon, more like a game, for electronic cigarettes, called “cloud-chasing”, and it has found a wide audience that doubled by 2014 When I talked about it, a group of famous platforms on the Internet.

Smoking is smoking, then, that is the obvious problem that the study of the New York University team points to, and with the escalation of the use of electronic cigarettes in the Arab world and the expansion of the number of its users of different age groups and social classes, especially among adolescents in secondary school age, the alarm bells must be ringing Strongly and quickly, this concept of "smoking is smoking" must be accompanied by extensive advertising campaigns related to educating citizens that electronic cigarettes are not very different from their regular companion, otherwise we are facing a very strong penetration point;

Smoking during it may succeed in penetrating hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of new victims, from age groups in which we did not expect smoking to spread to such a degree.