By Carol A. Cates, MSN, MBA, RN, NEA-BC
Chief Nursing Officer
Odessa Regional Medical Center
Sometimes I am amazed at how far medical technology has advanced since I was a baby nurse back in the early 90’s. Back in those days, stents of any kind didn’t exist and robotic surgery wasn’t even a consideration. Cancer was almost always a death sentence. The advances we have made in the last 30 years, have changed so many things for the better and saved so many lives.
Stents have created a minimally invasive way to treat everything from heart attacks to kidney stones. The technology of stents has even advanced to where we can replace heart valves in some people by way of the major blood vessels rather than cutting open their chests.
Robotic surgeries give surgeons the ability to do surgeries through as few as one tiny incision, where 30 years ago, the same surgery was a incision several inches long or as many as 7 small incisions. Robotics also has the potential of bringing specialty surgeons to patients in remote parts of the world rather than patients to surgeons as we do now.
Cancers are increasingly curable, even in advanced stages. But, as much as we have learned in the history of medical technology, even with all the advances in the last 30 years, there is still so much we don’t know. One of the things we don’t know is the long-term effects of vaping, particularly on young people who vape.
But we are learning more every day about the long-term effects of vaping. Unfortunately, what we are finding out is not positive. At the American Neurological Associations annual meeting last week, researchers from Ecuador, looked at cognitive scores of students who vaped, smoked, both smoked and vaped, and compared those to students who did not vape or smoke. They found that students who vaped 10-20 times per day had scores 9% lower than then non-vaping/smoking group and those who vaped more than 20 times per day had scores nearly 14% lower. Those that smoked and vaped had the lowest cognitive scores.
Dr. Francesco Versace, a researcher at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, states that while we don’t know much about vaping and its effects, we do know quite a bit about one of the common chemicals in vapes, nicotine. Nicotine is highly addictive. Years ago, I was told by a patient, “It’s harder to quit smoking than it is to quit heroin.” I don’t think I truly understood how addicting nicotine is until that patient’s statement. Nicotine affects both reward processes and executive functions in the brain. That means nicotine motivates you to use it again, and quite literally makes you think about using when you stop.
Nicotine produces feelings like food, social connections, and sex do, and it quite literally “hijacks” those emotions to bias them towards using nicotine. Developing brains are even more vulnerable to nicotine. It can affect attention, impulse control, mood, and sensitivity to rewards. Young people who use nicotine also much more likely to have mental health problems and use other addictive substances. Nicotine lowers blood flow to the brain and has been linked to shrinkage of the brain. Nicotine is also a neurotoxin and can directly damage brain cells.
The known effects of nicotine on the brain go hand-in-hand with the study results from Ecuador. What was really frightening to me, however, is those researchers found that people who vape tend to have a much higher intake of nicotine than those who smoke. They found that people who vape tend to intake 2 to 3 times more nicotine than those that just smoke, those that smoke and vape have the highest levels of nicotine use. The researchers said that an e-cigarette with 20,000 puffs is designed to last about 3 months, but a large percentage of the students they studied were using up those devices in a month or less.
As with most emerging research, more studies need to be done. This study was done with only 400 subjects, all of whom were college students of Ecuadorian descent. The researchers fully admit that more research needs to be done using a larger and more diverse subject group. Having said that, I do feel there is ample evidence with this study and with the known effects of nicotine on developing brains from hundreds of other studies to say that vaping has a significant potential to cause harm, particularly in our kids.
If you vape or smoke, you can quit. It’s not easy, but it is absolutely do-able. Talk to your primary healthcare provider about ways they can help you quit. Better yet, don’t ever start.
