General health effects
Now that you know the process behind vaping, what are the consequences to your health? While e-cigarettes are marketed as harmless water vapor, this could not be further from the truth. In this section, we will cover the health risks to the person smoking, and explore secondhand smoke effects in the next lesson.
Hover over each card below to learn more about the effects of vaping.
Nicotine
- An extremely addictive substance that is found in most e-cigarettes
- Nicotine can harm a pregnant woman and cause damage to a fetus’s brain and lungs
- Acute nicotine exposure can be toxic to both adults and children
- Nicotine impacts youth in a unique way, as their brains are still developing
Additional substances
- E-cigarette aerosol contains:
- Cancer-causing chemicals
- Heavy metals like nickel, tin, and lead
- Small particles that are inhaled into the lungs
- Volatile organic compounds
- Chemical flavorings that are linked to lung disease
Health conditions
- Studies have found that using e-cigarettes over a long period of time can damage how our blood vessels function, and increase our risk of cardiovascular disease
- Some people who vape have reported that they started experiencing seizures
- Nicotine addiction has been linked to certain mental health conditions, such as depression, anxiety, and stress
Injury
- E-cigarettes have been known to cause injuries after defective batteries have corroded or caught fire
These dangers to our health should be enough to convince anyone to avoid vaping. But as with most unhealthy habits, we need to understand why vaping is so appealing, particularly to adolescents. We’ll tackle those questions later in this course.