Can E-Cigarettes Make You Sick?

While this study only tested one cold virus, doctors says e-cigs might lower your defenses against other bugs, like the flu. Image via Thinkstock

You’ve already heard that electronic cigarettes might be useless for kicking the habit .

Instead, they could make you dependent on something else: tissues. Vaping may curb your ability to fight colds, suggests a new study from National Jewish Health in Denver.

Researchers exposed healthy human airway cells to either e-cig fluid or a harmless liquid. Next, the cells were infected with human rhinovirus-16, a strain of the common cold.

Within six hours, the cells exposed to e-cig juice harbored more rhinovirus, produced more inflammatory proteins, and expressed less of an infection-fighting protein called SPLUNC1 than the other cells. That may open the door to illness.
There is no evidence, no convincing evidence that using e-cigarettes leads to people quitting. There's not even convincing evidence it leads to people smoking less, although I guess that might be possible.

“The reduction in these proteins may be one of the mechanisms by which e-cigarette smoke increases the likelihood of viral infection,” says study author Dr Hong Wei Chu. In a separate experiment, mice who couldn’t make SPLUNC1 were more susceptible to a virus.

MORE: Smoking ruins the taste of beer

So how does vaping hijack your body’s natural defenses? It’s unclear which chemicals in e-cigs are responsible for the immune-suppressing effect, says Dr Chu, because even nicotine-free versions were harmful.

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Even scarier: while this study only tested one cold virus, Dr Chu says e-cigs might lower your defenses against other bugs, like the flu. “They may be bad for other bacterial infections, other strains of viral infections—people just have to watch out,” he says.

According to the ABC , British American Tobacco offshoot Nicoventures approached the Therapeutic Goods Administration in November 2013, describing e-cigs as medicine. It wrote, "We have found these face-to-face meetings to be extremely productive ... to fully explain our medicines based approach."

The takeaway: skip e-cigs—especially if you have asthma, a history of pneumonia, or if you tend to have trouble kicking colds, Dr Chu says. If you think you need nicotine replacement to kick cigarettes to the curb, stick with an TGA-approved option, such as a nicotine patch.