I don't have time to develop this more, but I just wanted to point out a couple of things. This comes from a brief personal literature review I made before picking up vaping and is not intended as an "authoritative" comment.
First, believe it or not, we do not know what are the risks of long term use of nicotine alone. Not entirely. Most of the large studies done focused on smoking and, to a lesser degree, on other forms of tobacco consumption. As far as I know, there is no large prospective study of any sort looking at nicotine alone.
Briefly, there is no "real world" data showing any clinical effects of long term use of nicotine alone.
There is some encouraging data from the Swedish Snus cohorts. In a Swedish cohort study of construction workers carried out during the 1970s it was found that Snus users had an increased risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, although the risk was lower than in cigarette smokers. Interestingly, there is data showing that snuff users and smokers share an increased prevalence of other independent risk factors for vascular disease (Increased levels of alcohol and coffee consumption and a decreased level of physical exercise) which may explain the higher (but not statistically significant) incidence of cardiovascular disease in snus users.
But snus is still tobacco, and one should expect it to be more hazardous than nicotine alone, still. So the above findings about snus, probably extend to nicotine. The only other possibility is extremely unlikely - that smokeless tobacco would contain something never before seen that has a protective effect against the nicotine ill effects.
Interestingly, European healthcare authorities used this data to support clinical safety of nicotine replacement therapies such as patch and spray, while in the EU Snus continues to be banned. Yes, the thing that was proven to be safer than cigarettes and that helped Sweden reach one of the lowest smoking prevalence in the world is banned. Just to show that ethics and logic are no factors in policy making.
The second point is that today, in a variety of popular science sources, as well as in some implied statements by public health authorities, "emerging data" that proves nicotine alone is responsible for some of the ill effects of smoking is often quoted.
To date, as far as I am aware, all such data is from small experimental studies, either on humans or animals, and proves acute, short-term effects of nicotine on blood pressure, vascular reactivity and glucose metabolism. (True, there is evidence from the Snus cohorts that nicotine, or at least smokeless tobacco, does have might have an ill effect on glucose metabolism / diabetes).
The absolute most such results could mean is that it is worth testing the hypothesis that nicotine alone has some of these effects by means of larger studies. However, the media and, most unfortunately, public health authorities worldwide, have represented these findings as "proof" that nicotine is "a major contributor" to smoking's ill effects. At this point, such representation is incorrect.
Let me give you one example. A 2002 paper by Neunteufl et al. was widely reported in the media and is still the basis for conclusions on dozens of health and wellness websites (and even quoted in the anti-nicotine policy at my workplace). This study was reported in the media, through an interview with the authors as follows:
"The findings of this study demonstrate that nicotine causes endothelial dysfunction in long-term smokers "
The way this is phrased led to the interpretation that the cardiovascular risk of long term smokers is caused by nicotine.
However, what it really says is that Neunteufl and his colleagues ran a study on a handful of long-term smoker volunteers and shown that with acute exposure to intranasal nicotine spray, in these subjects, there was a small, but statistically significant change in vascular reactivity. It didn't look at long term effects, but the study subjects were long-term smokers. In fact, that makes it more difficult to interpret because vascular reactivity in long term, current smokers is impaired to begin with due to... smoking. So their reaction to nicotine, or any other vasoconstrictor, may be exaggerate compared to a nicotine-alone user. Even funnier, in the actual scientific paper, the conclusion is "We conclude that nicotine replacement therapy by nasal spray is less harmful for the endothelium than cigarette smoking".
I'm just pointing this out as an example on how data can be given an entirely new and false meaning when it is reported to the public.
: Caffeine might be dangerous to a few consumers with other medical issues, but I feel for most of us it's not a serious health hazzard, .......and if nicotine is no more damaging than caffeine, as a smoker, I'm pretty happy I found vaping e-cigs (and my goal is to quit analogs completely).
i was flat giddy
