New UCLA research suggests that smoking tobacco and vaping electronic cigarettes may increase healthy young people's risk for developing severe COVID illness.
, but also vaping, may predispose people to increased inflammation and future development of severe COVID-19 and the lingering cardiovascular complications that can occur after initial illness from the virus, said Dr. Theodoros Kelesidis, the study's lead author.
"The key message is that smoking is the worst, but vaping is not innocent," said Kelesidis, associate professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA."This has been shown for many but not for COVID. It was a quite interesting and novel finding that vaping changed the levels of key proteins that the virus uses to replicate."The investigators examined plasma collected before the pandemic from 45 non-smokers, 30 electronic cigarette vapers, and 29 tobacco cigarette smokers, testing it to measure levels of since-identified proteins that SARS-CoV-2, the virus at the heart of the pandemic, needs in order to replicate.
"E-cigarette vapers may be at higher risk than non-smokers of developing infections and inflammatory disorders of the lungs," Kelesidis said."Electronic cigarettes are not harmless and should be used for only the shortest time possible in smoking cessation, and not at all by non-smokers." Limitations include the small size of the study, which suggests the need for research with a larger sample size; the reliance on testing
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