What Are the Health Risks of Vaping for Women?

Today’s e-cigarettes come in all kinds of designs and often have a strong sense of style, which has led some women to start trying them. After all, many women do care about how products look, and e-cigarettes happen to satisfy that preference.

What health risks do e-cigarettes pose for girls and women?

1. First, they may be addictive

Using e-cigarettes can also lead to nicotine dependence, because e-cigarettes contain large amounts of nicotine, and in some cases the nicotine content can be even higher than in conventional cigarettes. Once inhaled, nicotine enters the brain and stimulates dopamine release, creating a sense of pleasure and thereby causing addiction.

2. They may affect fertility

According to a mouse study published in the Journal of the Endocrine Society, using e-cigarettes may affect fertility and pregnancy outcomes.

The study’s corresponding author, Dr. Kathleen Caron of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said: ”We found that using e-cigarettes before pregnancy significantly delays the implantation of a fertilized embryo in the uterus, thereby delaying and reducing fertility in mice. We also found that using e-cigarettes during pregnancy alters the long-term health and metabolism of female offspring, producing lifelong secondary effects on the developing fetus.”

In this study, researchers used a mouse model to examine whether e-cigarettes could harm fertility and offspring health. After exposure to e-cigarette aerosol, female mice had lower embryo implantation rates, and their first pregnancies were significantly delayed. After maternal exposure to e-cigarettes in utero, by 8.5 months the body weight of the offspring had also increased less than that of the control group.

Caron said: ”These findings are important because they change our view of the safety of e-cigarettes as a substitute for traditional cigarettes before and during pregnancy.”

3. They may reduce women’s sleep quality

Users of e-cigarettes often take puffs from these nicotine-delivery devices immediately before going to sleep, and may even keep e-cigarettes on the bedside table for quick access, said Dr. Laura E. Crotty Alexander, associate professor of pulmonary medicine. She is involved in critical care and sleep medicine at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and is also a physician with the VA San Diego Healthcare System. In an email, she wrote: “This led to our hypothesis that if nicotine is the primary driver of these effects, then inhaling nicotine immediately before bedtime would lead to sleep disruption similar to that seen with traditional smoking.”

Among 274 study participants, Crotty Alexander and her colleagues used the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), the Leicester Cough Questionnaire (LCQ), and the UCSD Inhalant Use Questionnaire to assess sleep, coughing, and the use of tobacco or e-cigarettes.

The data showed that participants who used both e-cigarettes and conventional cigarettes had the highest PSQI scores (8.77), followed by those who used only e-cigarettes (6.87), those who only smoked cigarettes (7.88), and non-smokers (7.09; p=0.027), with significant differences between the groups. However, this pattern was found among women, not men.

Summary

The harms of long-term e-cigarette use for women may mainly include the three points above. So if you do not smoke, it is best not to start using e-cigarettes, and especially not to use them just to follow a trend, as that may lead to continued e-cigarette use.