Clear The Air News Tobacco Blog Rotating Header Image

Fresh analysis reveals probable carcinogens in e-cigarette vapour

Vaping emits harmful compounds – including propylene glycol and glycerine – as solvents are broken down by heat

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/probable-carcinogens-found-in-e-cigarette-vapour/1010018.article

The vapour from electronic cigarettes includes not only the carcinogens formaldehyde and acrolein, but also probable carcinogens like propylene oxide and glycidol, according to new analysis by a group Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in the US. The researchers discovered that the thermal decomposition of two common solvents in e-liquids that are vaporised by e-cigarettes – propylene glycol and glycerine – leads to emissions of significant levels of 31 harmful chemical compounds.

There have been ongoing debates about whether cigarette smokers should be encouraged to switch to e-cigarettes amid a dearth of data about the short and long-term health effects of this relatively new technology.

This study also showed that factors like the temperature, type, and age of an e-cigarette affect emission levels. E-cigarettes were shown to release more toxins as voltage increases and with repeated use. In fact, increasing the voltage and heat in a single-coil vaporiser tripled the aldehyde emissions per puff and bumped up the acrolein levels by a factor of 10. For example, conventional tobacco cigarettes emit 400–650µg of acrolein per cigarette, and assuming 20 puffs on an e-cigarette equals smoking a conventional cigarette, the researchers estimated that total emissions of acrolein per e-cigarette are about 90–100µg. In the study, aldehyde emissions increased by more than 60% after the device was reused several times, which the researchers said was likely due to the buildup of polymerisation by-products that degraded upon heating.

The LBNL team suggested that their findings could help the efforts of manufacturers and regulators to minimise the negative health impacts of e-cigarettes.

References

M Sleiman et al, Environ. Sci. Technol., 2016, DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.6b01741

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>