Studies show:

Cigarettes plus “vaping” is really bad

The combination of e-cigarettes and regular use of "real" cigarettes increases the risk of lung cancer.(Bild: stock.adobe.com/fedorovacz)

E-cigarettes, but also a "real cigarette" - that's obviously very bad for your health. US scientists have now proven that the risk of lung cancer is four times higher in such cases. According to the experts, this is also supported by animal studies.

"Exposure to nicotine through the use of electronic systems (vaping) has already been shown to increase the risk of various types of lung damage. However, the impact of 'vaping' on lung cancer risk was previously unknown," Randall Harris and his co-authors from the Comprehensive Cancer Center at Ohio University in Columbus recently wrote in the Journal of Oncology Research and Therapy.

Lung cancer risk increased 14-fold
As part of a so-called case-control study, the scientists therefore compared 4975 patients with a lung cancer diagnosis with 27,294 people with the same personal characteristics without cancer. The following results show how disastrous smoking or "vaping" is for health, especially for the risk of lung cancer: Cigarette smokers had a 14-fold increased risk of lung cancer compared to non-smokers.

The combination of e-cigarettes and regular use of "real" cigarettes increased the likelihood of developing lung cancer 59-fold, which corresponds to a fourfold increase in risk compared to conventional cigarettes alone.

Vaping is also harmful
If the scientists statistically compensated for any additional diseases such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), coronary heart disease, etc., the probability of such a carcinoma decreased in both groups, but the difference between cigarette smokers alone and users of "vaporizers" plus cigarettes remained the same. The difference was the same for men and women and affected all different types of lung cancer.

As the US scientists write, these results from the case-control study are supported by at least two scientific studies with animal experiments: When animals were exposed to vapor from e-cigarettes for a year, almost a quarter developed lung cancer, and almost 60 percent of the animals showed bladder cancer precursors. Damage to the DNA repair mechanisms that protect against carcinomas caused by vaping was proven.