Young Adults Vaping Wanted for Lung Study | CBC News

Researchers at Dalhousie University are recruiting people aged 18 to 25 for a study of the effects of vaping.

“Honestly, we can’t wait to wait 40 years to find out if vaping is bad for us,” said Sanja Stanojevic, a respiratory epidemiologist and one of the people behind the study.

Vaping is relatively new and has become very common, Stanojevic said, particularly among teens and young adults.

Some of the highest usage rates are in the Maritimes, she said.

In 2021, 13 percent of Canadian youth ages 15 to 19 and 17 percent of young adults ages 20 to 24 said they had vaped at least once in the 30 days preceding the survey, according to a Statistics Canada release from last spring.

This compares to a rate of four percent for Canadian adults aged 25 and older surveyed.

New Brunswick had the highest rate of vaping at nine percent, Statistics Canada said, followed by Prince Edward Island at eight percent.

A certain amount of evidence already points to negative effects of vaping, Stanojevic said.

What has not yet been seen is what happens in the human lungs at early stages.

A few deaths were linked to vaping in the United States in 2019, she noted, but these were attributed to people adding things to their vaping devices.

“It’s very difficult to know exactly what’s happening because some of the tools we have don’t quite see those differences yet.”

In questionnaires, people who vape report more respiratory symptoms, Stanojevic said.

“They tend to cough more, have more phlegm, often report difficulty breathing.”

However, with standard spirometry pulmonary function tests, it’s “really hard to tell differences”.

Spirometry measures how much air you breathe in, how much you breathe out, and how fast you breathe out.

It’s a really good test, she said, but it focuses on the large airways — the equivalent of the trunk, if you think of the lungs as a tree.

“You must be quite sick — you must have quite a bit of damage to your lungs, and particularly the large airways, before we start seeing those differences.”

Even with cigarette smoke, she said, it takes 40 years of constant exposure to see changes this way.

The Dalhousie study uses a different type of breath test to try to capture what’s happening earlier, Stanojevic said. It examines how the lungs exchange gas.

Gas exchange takes place at the level of the smaller branches in ‘tiny’ airways ‘far away from this main branch’.

Healthy lungs can exchange all of their air within five or six volume changes, or 10 to 15 breaths, she said.

Damaged lungs take longer to replace all of their air.

“If you have damage in those small airways and you either have inflammation that’s having trouble opening it or you have scar tissue where air is trapped in parts of your lungs. The tests we use actually capture that.”

The breath test has been around since the 1960s, Stanojevic said, and it’s proven to be “really sensitive” for early detection of changes in children with chronic respiratory disease.

She and her colleagues think it should also be able to determine if damage occurs from vaping and provide direction for future research.

They’re starting with test subjects between the ages of 18 and 25 because they’re easier to recruit, she said, but eventually hope to test some younger vapers.

“Most people don’t realize that your lungs continue to grow and develop well into your 20s,” Stanojevic said.

“One of the concerns we have is that if we expose our lungs to harmful toxins like the vaporized flavors and vaporized liquids that are contained within the vape devices, we could actually prevent the lungs from reaching their maximum during this growth phase reach capacity. “

Failure to reach peak lung growth predisposes a person to later lung disease.

Most of the time they are looking for people who only use pod type e-cigarettes because the doses are measurable.

Participants must go to a lab on the Dalhousie University campus in Halifax for a visit that lasts about 40 minutes, Stanojevic said. You will receive a $20 gift card.

For more information you can email [email protected]