Glantz Heart “Research” Published
Stanton Glantz, a man with a Trumpian affinity for telling the truth, rehashes his heart ‘study’ for publication, without any corrections
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by Dave Cross
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The University of California San Francisco (UCSF) professor has a long history of extremist opposition to vaping based on fantasies, including a belief that Big Tobacco runs the vape market, that vaping is a gateway to smoking and flavours are being used to target children.
UCSF claims it “is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research,” but the work produced by Glantz would go to prove otherwise. Even UNICEF has slammed him for “serious inaccuracies and misrepresentations” in a previous piece of work.
The professor of medicine (not a qualified clinician) and director of the UCSF Centre for Tobacco Control Research and Education presented the research in the form of a poster, in February, at the 2018 annual meeting of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco.
At the time, Carl Phillips wrote in the Daily Caller: "It has not yet appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, but it will, and the peer-review process will do nothing to correct the errors noted here."
“There is no possible way the data they used can be used to estimate risks from vaping due to the unmeasured confounding effects of smoking.”
Professor Michael Siegel noted: “Before accepting the conclusion that vaping causes heart attacks in unsuspecting smokers, remember the old adage: correlation does not equal causation. This study is a perfect demonstration of that phenomenon.”
Shortly afterwards, even a report by the anti-vape American Heart Association contradicted his findings – and went on to debunk some of Glantz’ other daft claims.
The paper has now been published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, titled ‘A cross sectional study reveals an association between electronic cigarette use and myocardial infarction’.
The research relied upon making links between two penetrating questions:
- Have you EVER been told by a doctor or other health professional that you had a heart attack, also called myocardial infarction (MI)?
- Have you ever used an e-cigarette, even one time?
Even Glantz admits, “it is not known when the MIs occurred relative to e-cigarette use”, “it is likely that some of the heart attacks subjects reported occurred before e-cigarettes became available”, and “cigarette smokers (might have) had their MI while they were smoking traditional cigarettes.”
Of course, this doesn’t prevent him from stating in the UCSF press release: “While people may think they are reducing their health risks, we found that the heart attack risk of e-cigarettes adds to the risk of smoking cigarettes.”
Colin Mendelsohn, a tobacco treatment specialist and Associate Professor in the School of Public Health and Community Medicine at the University of New South Wales, reacted strongly to the current paper.
Mendelsohn said: “Shameful! Professor Glantz claims his study shows that ecigs double heart attack risk. The study finds no such thing; it shows heart attack survivors are more likely to use ecigs to quit than others. It is impossible to make any causal link. No wonder the public is confused.”
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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