Vaping could put healthy young people at higher risk of severe COVID-19

By Alice Clifford via SWNS

Vaping could put healthy young people at higher risk of developing severe COVID-19, warns a new study.

Using e-cigarettes can lead to an increase in inflammation and can cause lingering cardiovascular complications after the initial illness, said UCLA scientists.

Dr. Theodoros Kelesidis, of David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, said: “The key message is that smoking is the worst, but vaping is not innocent.

“This has been shown for many lung diseases 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 team examined plasma collected before the pandemic from 45 non-smokers, 30 vapers and 29 tobacco smokers.

Studying the plasma, they measured the levels of proteins that the virus needs in order to replicate.

These proteins are ACE2, furin, Ang II, Ang 1–7, IL-6R, sCD163, L-selectin.

The last three proteins are collectively regulated in cells by a protein known as ADAM17.

The researchers found that plasma from healthy young people who smoke tobacco or vape had increased levels of furin, sCD163, and L-selectin compared to non-smokers.

This data suggests that there may be increased activity of the proteins furin and ADAM17 in the immune cells as well as surface cells, lining the lungs, in healthy young smokers and vapers.

Dr. Kelesidis said: “E-cigarette vapers may be at higher risk than non-smokers of developing infections and inflammatory disorders of the lungs.

“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.”

The study did have a variety of limitations. These included the small sample size and the lack of evidence of the role that the ADAM17 proteins play in severe COVID among non-smokers.

Also, they relied on testing blood plasma rather than tissue samples such as lung cells that are believed to be affected by smoking and vaping.

The study was published in the Journal of Molecular Medicine.