(Press-News.org) Young people are just as likely to try electronic cigarettes as smoking, according to a new report from the Propel Centre for Population Health Impact at the University of Waterloo.
The findings, published today in Tobacco Use in Canada: Patterns and Trends, reveal that approximately 20 per cent of youth between the ages of 15 and 19 experiment with vaping, the same number who try cigarettes.
"E-cigarettes have become increasingly popular among Canadians," said David Hammond, lead author on the report and a professor in the School of Public Health and Health Systems at Waterloo. "Now one in five youth will try vaping before graduating high school."
The devices create a vapour by heating a chemical solution of propylene glycol, flavouring agents and sometimes nicotine. Unlike regular cigarettes, e-cigarettes do not contain tobacco and no combustion takes place when they are used.
"There is no question that e-cigarettes are a harmful consumer product because of all of the chemicals users inhale. However, because they don't produce smoke, they are significantly less harmful than smoking," said Professor Hammond, who testified to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health in November.
The Canadian government has not approved the sale of e-cigarettes containing nicotine, despite an increasing number of smokers using the products to help them quit or during times when smoking is not allowed. Nicotine is the substance that is primarily responsible for the addictiveness of tobacco.
"At the moment, we have an uncontrolled experiment with e-cigarettes: millions of Canadians are trying products with unknown safety standards for a wide variety of reasons. There is an urgent need for even more evidence to guide policy in this fast-moving area," said Professor Hammond.
Currently, several provinces are developing policies for the sale and marketing of e-cigarettes both with and without nicotine. In March, Parliament released a report identifying 14 recommendations to regulate them.
In total, more than 2.5 million Canadians have tried e-cigarettes, with smokers and young people making up the largest demographic of ongoing users.
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BIOMETRICS - 3-D face analysis ...
Law enforcement and national security agencies could benefit from an Oak Ridge National Laboratory technology able to determine a person's age, race and gender with high fidelity. "Normally, computers estimate age by looking for wrinkles or estimate gender by looking at specific two-dimensional distances or 2-D texture," said Ryan Tokola of ORNL's Imaging, Signals and Machine Learning Group. ORNL's system allows users to employ the same set of features to estimate age with an error of less than five years, gender with 89 percent accuracy ...
(New York -- May 4, 2015) -- Patients with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) have a four-fold increase in their risk of developing intermediate-stage age-related macular degeneration (AMD) compared to people of the same age who are not infected with HIV, according to results from the Longitudinal Study of the Ocular Complications of AIDS (LSOCA) presented today at the 2015 ARVO Annual Meeting in Denver, CO. The results of the study, led by the National Eye Institute-funded Studies of the Ocular Complications of AIDS Research Group, were also published online in ...
Scientists, conservationists and governments could have a new weapon in their struggle to gauge -- and halt -- the devastation of the wildlife trade on populations of prized animals: the very markets where the animals are bought and sold.
Species that are disappearing as a result of the pet trade can be identified by changes in their market prices and trade volumes, a study led by researchers at Princeton University found. The researchers studied open-air pet markets on the Indonesian island of Sumatra and found that bird species that increased in price but decreased ...
Bad news, fans of rational political discourse: A study by an MIT researcher shows that attempts to debunk political rumors may only reinforce their strength.
"Rumors are sticky," says Adam Berinsky, a professor of political science at MIT, and author of a paper detailing the study. "Corrections are difficult, and in some cases can even make the problem worse."
More specifically, Berinsky found in an experiment concerning the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that rebuttals of political rumors about the supposed existence of "death panels" sometimes increased belief in the ...
ANN ARBOR--The main job of pollen is to help seed the next generation of trees and plants, but a new study from the University of Michigan and Texas A&M shows that the grains might also seed clouds.
The unexpected findings demonstrate that these wind-carried capsules of genetic material might have an effect on the planet's climate. And they highlight a new link between plants and the atmosphere.
Pollen has been largely ignored by atmospheric scientists who study aerosols--particles suspended in the air that scatter light and heat and play a role in cloud formation.
"The ...
Since 2014 dulaglutide has been approved alone or in combination with other drugs for the treatment of adults with type 2 diabetes. The German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) examined in a dossier assessment whether this new drug offers an added benefit over the appropriate comparator therapies.
IQWiG found a hint of minor added benefit for the combination with short-acting insulin with or without metformin. In contrast, an added benefit of dulaglutide versus the respective appropriate comparator therapy is not proven for the combination with ...
Studies have long associated low-income areas with poor oral health. But dental researchers at Case Western Reserve University and University of Washington sensed that other factors related to income may be at work -- in particular, education level.
So they recently investigated how a parent or other caregiver's education level and dental habits affect children's dental health.
With data from 423 low-income African-American kindergarteners and their caregivers from a CWRU dental school study in 2007, researchers tested the hypothesis that a caregiver's education ...
MAYWOOD, IL - Patients infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) can, in rare cases, experience bleeding on the brain that causes a type of stroke called intracerebral hemorrhage.
A Loyola University Medical Center case study demonstrates that a virus called varicella-zoster can cause inflammation of blood vessels in the brain. This inflammation, known as cerebral vasculitis, can cause both hemorrhagic and non-hemorrhagic strokes.
The study by Daniel Vela Duarte MD, David Pasquale, MD, and senior author Murray Flaster, MD, PhD, was presented during a meeting of ...
Madrid, Spain - 3 May 2015: A new test has been developed to predict sudden cardiac death in hemodialysis patients in whom such forecasts were previously impossible. The novel method was presented at ICNC 12 by Dr Akiyoshi Hashimoto, a cardiologist at Sapporo Medical University in Japan. The test uses a combination of nuclear medicine, C-reactive protein and electrocardiogram (ECG).
ICNC is organised by the Nuclear Cardiology and Cardiac CT section of the European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging (EACVI), a registered branch of the European Society of Cardiology ...
HIV-1 replication requires the coordinated movement of the virus's components toward the plasma membrane of an immune cell, where the virions are assembled and ultimately released. A study in The Journal of Cell Biology reveals how a Rab protein that controls intracellular trafficking supports HIV-1 assembly by promoting high levels of an important membrane lipid.
New HIV-1 particles assemble at specialized sites in the plasma membrane that are enriched in PIP2, a phospholipid component of the membrane that recruits a viral protein called Pr55Gag (Gag) that directs HIV-1 ...
