Are electronic cigarettes really any safer than smoking? A study that looked at the amount of cancer-causing chemicals in smoker’s bodies suggests yes.
“Less than half of current smokers in the UK believe that e-cigarettes are less harmful,” says Lion Shahab, at University College London. His team has screened urine and saliva samples from 181 people, looking for chemicals known to be linked to cancer. “What we found is that using e-cigarettes alone results in very low exposure to toxins and carcinogens,” said Shahab.
Compared with people who were currently smokers, the team found that former smokers who had been vaping only, for six months or more, had very low levels of some of the worst carcinogens found in tobacco smoke. NNAL, a chemical heavily linked to lung cancer, was 97.5 per cent lower in former smokers who now only vaped, compared with the average smoker.
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