What we still don’t know about vaping

With about 12% of high school students vaping daily, the use of vapes and other nicotine products among Canadian youth is a hot-button issue. But while researchers—and the general public—know that vaping is a common behaviour, the full extent of the health impacts remain uncertain.

Recently, the Government of Canada invested $19.3M to study ongoing, new, and emerging threats to lung health, including vaping, wildfire smoke, and pollution.

One recipient of the funding is Dr. David Hammond at the University of Waterloo, who is leading a five-year study on youth vaping behaviours. Dr. Hammond’s team will assess behavioural patterns to determine exposure to vaping aerosol, and at the same time examine toxic ingredients in vaping products that may be harming youth. But determining the impact of vaping on lung health isn’t straightforward:

“Vaping aerosol includes a range of toxic constituents that have the potential to increase the risk of respiratory disease, and possibly cardiovascular disease and cancer,” says Dr. Hammond. “However, the development of these diseases takes many years.”

“All of the evidence to date suggests that the risks from vaping products will be less than smoking tobacco,” he says. “At the same, regular vaping is almost certain to present health risks on its own, but we don’t have a good sense of the specific health conditions or level of risk. That is one of the main questions our study hopes to address.”

Dr. Hammond’s team also monitors the use of other types of nicotine used among youth, including nicotine pouches, which have recently become more common among youth. Understanding the increasing array of nicotine products is challenging given how quickly the market is evolving.