Study shows increased likelihood of asthma attacks in middle and high schoolers
E-cigarettes, sometimes touted as a safe alternative to smoking, come with their own risks. Yet another such potential danger was uncovered in a recent National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine report.
A new study finds secondhand exposure to vaping may raise the chances of asthma attacks in adolescents with the respiratory condition.
Middle school and high school students with asthma were 27 percent more likely to have suffered an asthma attack if they’d been exposed to vapor from someone else’s e-cigarette use, the researchers found.
“While we cannot definitively say these products worsen asthma, I think if I was a parent, I wouldn’t want to risk my kids being around people using these products,” lead researcher Jennifer Bayly told Medical Xpress.
Bayly and colleagues gathered data from the 2016 Florida Youth Tobacco Survey. It included a total of almost 70,000 high school and middle school students, aged 11 to 17. The study focused on 11,830 students who reported having asthma.
Overall, 21 percent of kids with asthma said they’d had an asthma attack during the previous year, and 33 percent said they’d been exposed to secondhand vapor from an e-cigarette.
This exposure to secondhand vapor was tied to a significantly increased risk of an asthma attack, even after researchers accounted for other factors, such as whether the teens used an e-cigarette themselves or had been exposed to tobacco smoke.
