Ban Call Highlights Expert Error
A father calling for vaping to be banned, due to his daughters being hospitalised, has highlighted a problem with the advice being given out by Asthma+Lung Org
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by Dave Cross
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A father has demanded that vaping is banned following the hospitalisation of both of his daughters. Both daughters, 19 and 17 years old, claim to have been vapers and blame that for them experiencing collapsed lungs. Action on Smoking and Health commented on the case by quoting Asthma+Lung Org – but there is a big evidence issue with Asthma+Lung Org’s position.
Mark Blight was very angry, as any father would be, when his second daughter was admitted to hospital due to a tight chest and shoulder/back pain. Tazmin Blight was taken into surgery when a bleb on her lung burst. Weeks beforehand, her elder sister Kyla experienced the same thing.
Newspaper articles were swift to point the finger at vaping, claiming, “she continued to vape the equivalent of 50 cigarettes a day despite her sister Kyla hitting headlines last month for being hospitalised due to them.”
The News and Star made up the fake fact that “a 10ml bottle of vape juice every five days…is the equivalent of nearly 50 cigarettes a day”.
Action on Smoking and Health commented: “A pneumothorax happens when air leaks out of the lung causing collapse of some or all of the lung. This can happen suddenly, for no apparent reason in an otherwise healthy child, most often to children aged 14 to 17, and affects around 3 in 100,000 children, Smoking tobacco is one of the main risk factors for primary spontaneous pneumothorax, especially in teenagers. Vaping and smoking cannabis can increase the risk of pneumothorax too. Existing lung conditions such as asthma can increase the risk, and there is also a strong familial link, with 1 in 10 people who experience pneumothorax having a family member who has also experienced one.”
The anti-smoking organisation pointed readers to Asthma+Lung Org’s website.
Planet of the Vapes contacted Asthma+Lung to ask if their text meant that vaping can cause a pneumothorax or vaping cannabis can cause a pneumothorax.
The specialist was unable to answer the question but promised they would find an answer for us.
A week later, Asthma+Lung told Planet of the Vapes: “Please see the information below regarding evidence-based information linking CBD to pneumothorax.”
We hadn’t asked about CBD.
They continued: “There have been several case studies linking vaping and cannabis separately to spontaneous pneumothorax (some are referenced in this paper, which was the source for our page), but nothing I can find about vaping CBD and pneumothorax specifically. However, there is some research into vaping CBD and respiratory symptoms more generally, such as this, and I found this case report about an acute lung injury induced by vaping CBD oil. Here is an excerpt from a BMJ article that may be useful:
‘As was the case with smoking, it likely will be decades after the introduction of e-cigarettes until the full picture regarding associations between vaping and diseases emerges. The current report is only the seventh case report to highlight vaping-related pneumothorax. However, pneumothorax in young adults has been strongly associated with cigarette smoking and cannabis use; case–control studies have established both as significant risk factors for pneumothorax.35 Yet, evidence of a causal relationship is lacking. Moreover, whole case series of vaping-related lung injury have been published without any patient experiencing a pneumothorax.32 36 Compared with this report, Jonas et al identified 8 patients with pneumothorax among 216 published cases with vaping-associated lung injury.31 In 2019, research has, for the first time, tried to identify cannabinoids in lung tissue of young adults with pneumothorax.7 While this is an important step in understanding the relationship between cannabis use and pneumothorax, evidence of cannabinoids in lung tissue does not provide proof of a pathology mechanism. Similarly, it might be difficult to establish a causal relationship between vaping and pneumothorax. However, if such a relationship exists, we expect to see a rise in cases of pneumothorax that accompanies the increased popularity of vaping’.”
Reading the supplied references, it is clear that Asthma+Lung is conflating the use of legal MHRA-registered nicotine containing eliquids (for the purposes of smoking cessation/prevention of relapse) with the use of illicit substances or uncontrolled additives.
Despite Asthma+Lung claiming “Vaping can increase the risk of pneumothorax too” on its website, it has provided no evidence to support this position.
Action on Smoking and Health complained about misinformation being spread about vaping last year, but here it is engaging in it itself. Both ASH UK and Asthma+Lung need to be sticking to evidence-based statements.
Photo Credit:
Photo by Robina Weermeijer on Unsplash, text image courtesy of Asthma+Lung
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.
