According to research published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, the first study on long-term health effects of electronic cigarettes finds that devices are linked to an increased risk of chronic lung diseases.
The study involved 32,000 adults in the U.S. and when the study began in 2013, not one person had any signs of lung disease.
But by 2016, investigators found that those who used e-cigarettes were 30 percent more likely to have developed a chronic lung disease, including asthma, bronchitis and emphysema, than nonusers.
“E-cigarette use predicted the development of lung disease over a very short period of time. It only took three years,” said Stanton Glantz, the study’s author, of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education of the University of California, San Francisco.