Farsalinos Attacks Adolescent Respiratory Study
A recent paper provides more evidence of fact manipulation and poor analysis being touted as scientific fact.
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by Dave Cross
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Rob McConnell and Jessica Barrington-Trimis have been making a number of outlandish statements about vaping over the last couple of years, straight out of the Stanton Glantz playbook of fibs. Both of them contributed to the recent paper “Electronic-cigarette Use and Respiratory Symptoms in Adolescents”, where McConnell was the lead author.
We have been tracking Barrington-Trimis’ contributions over the last couple of years. She pushes the ‘worried about the children’ agenda, but frequently only offers up conjecture rather than fact. The paper she contributed to claims to have demonstrated: “adolescent e-cigarette users had increased rates of chronic bronchitic symptoms.”
McConnell amplified his point of view: “E-cigarettes are known to deliver chemicals toxic to the lungs, including oxidant metals, glycerol vapor, diketone flavoring compounds and nicotine. However, there has been little study of the chronic health effects of e-cigarettes. The Children's Health Study provided an opportunity to examine bronchitic symptoms common among smokers to see if the risk was also increased in users of e-cigarettes.”
He continued: “The Food and Drug Administration recently banned the sale of e-cigarettes to children under 18 years of age, and California just prohibited sale to young adults under 21. Our results suggest that these regulations and an environment that discourages the initiation of any tobacco product [*ecigs are not a tobacco product] may reduce the burden of chronic respiratory symptoms in youth. However, because e-cigarettes are relatively new, additional study is needed to fully understand their long-term effects.”
Farsalinos, a long time advocate of vaping as a harm reduction strategy, is quick to attack the report: “The study recruited adolescents but did not define those with chronic bronchitis based on physician diagnosis or medications intake.” The researcher simply asked about youth experience with coughing.
Moreover, Farsalinos continues, this led the media to focus on lung disease and bronchitis where there was no clear diagnosis. Also, he pointed out, there is a clear distinction between acute and chronic conditions.
“The reported findings of 85% higher and double risk of respiratory symptoms among past and current e-cigarette users respectively is wrong for two reasons,” Farsalinos explained. “First, they did not measure any risk at all. This was a cross sectional study in which they reported odds ratios, not relative risk. The word “risk” is inappropriately used, because there was no assessment of previous exposure (e-cigarette use) and subsequent outcome (symptoms).”
For as long as people loosely claiming to be scientists can engage the media with fanciful tales, it is welcome that actual experts like Farsalinos are on hand to take them to task.
Dave Cross
Journalist at POTVDave is a freelance writer; with articles on music, motorbikes, football, pop-science, vaping and tobacco harm reduction in Sounds, Melody Maker, UBG, AWoL, Bike, When Saturday Comes, Vape News Magazine, and syndicated across the Johnston Press group. He was published in an anthology of “Greatest Football Writing”, but still believes this was a mistake. Dave contributes sketches to comedy shows and used to co-host a radio sketch show. He’s worked with numerous start-ups to develop content for their websites.
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