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.
