Ever been approached by someone while lighting up a cigarette, only to be told that you should really consider switching over to an E-Cigarette? According to some very convincing research, the electronic cigarette could be just as bad for you as smoking regular tobacco.

Scientists have found that the nicotine vapor we inhale does some pretty damaging things like raising the risk of heart disease and damaging key blood vessels. While monitoring 24 healthy, averaging 30 years of age participants’ hearts through smoking conventional cigarettes for 5 minutes and using and e-cigarette for half an hour, they claim that the most accurate results were achieved. The findings may shock you.

The two similar activities both led to stiffness in the aorta, which is a major cause of many well known heart problems and simultaneously, blood pressure was also quite drastically raised. Scientists stressed that this only essentially reveals short term damage, but it gives a pretty clear reading as to what’s happening. They also suggested that they will need to do further research into the long term effects.

They now claim that e-cigarettes may be far more dangerous than we realize, echoed by the British Heart Foundation who suggests that the devices  ‘could not be assumed to be risk-free’.

Furthermore, results presented at the European Society of Cardiology congress in Rome are bound to fuel the debate, with experts agreeing that they may be less harmful than picking up a normal cigarette, but still run major risks to our health.

The WHO – World Health Organisation also warns that the secondary vapors may be toxic to bystanders, similarly when compared to conventional cigarettes.

This has all come as quite a big shock as last year, Public Health England was pretty quick to encourage smokers to switch over to e-cigarettes, claiming that they were 95% safe! The biggest surprise at the time was that it emerged that the scientists making these claims were in fact funded by the e-cigarette industry! 

According to Professor Charalambos Vlachopoulos, of the University of Athens Medical School, the UK had ‘rushed into’ its promotion of e-cigarettes, adding: ‘E-cigarettes are less harmful but they are not harmless. I wouldn’t recommend them now as a method to give up smoking.’

The devices contain a liquid nicotine substance which is heated to create a vapor which is then inhaled, supposedly avoiding the harmful effects caused by tobacco smoke, but according to Professor Vlachopoulos, it’s in actual fact the nicotine itself that causes damage to the arteries. He is planning a similar trial which will be run using nicotine free e-cigarettes. 

Public Health England has since continued to back the devices, with a spokesman stating that ‘Vaping carries a fraction of the risk of smoking yet many smokers are still not aware.’

The e-cigarette industry’s trade body played down the recent research claiming that aortic stiffness is just “transitory” and a very poor measure of the long-term risks with Deborah Arnott from the campaign group, Action on Smoking and Health stating that vaping would be less damaging than tobacco if limited to five minute intervals.

What’s your take on this information? Do you smoke e-cigarettes?

With thanks to Daily Mail for this interesting find.