E-Cigarettes and Respiratory Disease: NO EVIDENCE

Drs. Dharma Bhatta and Stanton Glantz published a study in February’s American Journal of Preventive Medicine claiming that “Use of e-cigarettes is an independent risk factor for respiratory disease in addition to combustible tobacco smoking.” (here)  In a University of California San Francisco press release, Professor Glantz made additional claims: “We concluded that e-cigarettes are harmful on their own, and the effects are independent of smoking conventional tobacco…This study contributes to the growing case that e-cigarettes have long-term adverse effects on health and are making the tobacco epidemic worse.”

Now Cornell University researchers, led by economics professor Don Kenkel, have published a comprehensive re-analysis of that study (here), concluding:

“We find no evidence that current or former e-cigarette use is associated with respiratory disease.”

Kenkel and his co-authors explain why the Bhatta and Glantz claims are bogus: “The statistical associations that Bhatta and Glantz find between e-cigarette use and respiratory disease are driven by e-cigarette users who are also current or former smokers of combustible tobacco…almost all e-cigarette users were either current or former smokers of combustible tobacco. In the longitudinal analysis sample with 17,601 observations, there were only 12 current e-cigarette users who had never smoked combustible tobacco. None of the 12 respondents had incident (new) respiratory disease.”

In other words, while Bhatta and Glantz asserted that e-cigarettes were an “independent” risk factor for respiratory disease, only 12 vapers had never smoked and none of them developed the illness.

Last year, Bhatta and Glantz claimed in the Journal of the American Heart Association that e-cigarettes cause heart attacks.  Informed by my research group that many of the vapers’ heart attacks occurred years before they picked up their first e-cigarette, JAHA editors retracted that study in February.

It is important to note that Bhatta and Glantz used the same federal grants, totaling $13.6 million, to fund both the retracted JAHA heart attack study and the bogus AJPM respiratory disease study.  As I said in February, massive amounts of taxpayer dollars flowing to U.S. researchers who are anti-tobacco, anti-harm-reduction, in service of the government’s stated objective “to create a world free of tobacco use.”  Still, it is intolerable for public funds to be used in the production of scientifically unsound research.

The re-analysis by Kenkel and colleagues should prompt the American Journal of Preventive Medicine’s editors to revisit their decision to publish Bhatta and Glantz’s latest study.