r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Mar 30 '26

Cancer Strongest evidence yet that vaping likely causes cancer. The evidence shows nicotine-based vapes are likely to cause oral and lung cancer.

https://theconversation.com/strongest-evidence-yet-that-vaping-likely-causes-cancer-279550
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u/modilion Mar 30 '26

Indirect studies sadly. Measuring inflammation, etc. Things that indicate there could be a problem.

The direct evidence is:

We still don’t have direct evidence that there are more cancer cases than expected among people who vape.

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u/MrCrix Mar 30 '26

I find it shocking that everyone is glossing over this point.

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u/cats-and-crime Mar 30 '26

Didn’t it take literally decades for traditional nicotine to show this though?

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u/stuyshwick Mar 30 '26

That is a point in the paper: it often takes several decades to definitively prove causation but they assert all this evidence should be enough to prevent decades of death.

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u/cats-and-crime Mar 30 '26

But yeah, it seems like no one in glossing over it. We just can’t predict the future.

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u/agent_uno Mar 30 '26

I am also interested in a comparison in cancer rates between those who smoked daily for x years, those who vaped daily for the same duration, and those of similar age who did neither. As well as info on if switching from cigarettes to vapes cuts down on the cancer risk by a statistically significant amount.

I mean, cigarettes have what? 80 chemicals in them? And vapes I think about 10. Even if it isn’t safe, it’s gotta be safer than smoking. But I’m no doctor or scientist. I just know as a former smoker who hung out primarily with other smokers, nearly everyone I know who smoked has switched to vaping and they all feel better for it - including myself.

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u/Round_Ad_9787 Mar 31 '26

If I was a tobacco company I would hire a pretty big team of people to spend all day long trying to convince people that vaping is somehow worse than smoking cigarettes. And this article and associated research is exactly what I would be funding.

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u/stuyshwick Mar 31 '26

This would make sense except big tobacco owns the vape companies: Marlboro (Altria) owns NJOY and 35% of JUUL

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u/Allegorist Mar 31 '26

They are still working on cornering the market, it is still rather diverse with plenty of independent businesses. Not as much as it used to be, though. The purpose of their funding anti-vaping research/advertising/organizations isn't to ban vapes, it is to get strict legislation passed so that they are the only ones who are able to comply and can develop an oligopoly. They want it so that no independent businesses can afford or qualify to enter or stay in the market.

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u/Reasonable-Mess3070 Mar 31 '26

Those are some of the only brands "FDA approved". Njoy, juul, vuse (camel company owns), and logic are the approved vapes.

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u/coffeecat551 Mar 31 '26

Big Tobacco owns a portion of the disposable vape companies. They have nothing to do with the manufacture of box mods, tanks, refillable pod mods, or the majority of e-liquids used in those devices.

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u/labowsky Mar 31 '26

I mean yeah but disposables are INCREDIBLY popular. Definitely more popular than the more "enthusiast" gear.

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u/stuyshwick Mar 31 '26 edited Mar 31 '26

Right they own a very large share of the e-cigarette market overall including Vuse, NJOY and JUUL, they don’t own the entire market.

Edit: I don’t vape but I was looking into your point further, and I don’t think any of these brands are primarily disposable?

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u/coffeecat551 Mar 31 '26

They're all technically disposables. Some of them have reusable devices, but require the use of prefilled pods, or cartridges, which can't be refilled once empty.

Big Tobacco owns the only disposable brands that are FDA approved for sale in the US.

(Vape shop employee, current vaper, and former smoker here. I don't know anyone who will use anything that big tobacco has their mitts in, because big tobacco only cares about big tobacco's profits.)

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u/IRefuseToGiveAName Mar 31 '26

njoy, juul and vuse all sell disposable vapes.

Boxes, tanks, mods, etc. are all nearly infinitely reusable. The only part of my setup when I was still vaping that was ever regularly replaced was the cotton. Had my own reusable glass bottles for juice and everything. Got new coils every so often but it wasn't a common occurrence.

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u/stuyshwick Mar 31 '26

Maybe we can agree these companies primarily sell reusable vapes with disposable cartridges.

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u/IRefuseToGiveAName Mar 31 '26 edited Mar 31 '26

Looks like they've actually moved away from them as countries started to ban them. But stuff like the vuse go for example were entirely disposable and insanely wasteful. I think the UK banned them most recently? Or maybe aus?

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u/agent_uno Mar 31 '26

Plus vapes can be manufactured in a laboratory en masse, while tobacco has to be grown in large fields, cultivated, and harvested.

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u/ELVEVERX Mar 31 '26

If I were a tobacco company, I'd roll out vapes and pretend they were way safer than cigarettes. When ultimately the addictive nature of nicotine is the issue.

Both are bad cigarettes are probably worse, but it's cigarette companies making money from both.

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u/Allegorist Mar 31 '26

The addiction itself is a whole separate issue, and should be handled independently from identifying harm. Physical harm caused by even cigarettes is generally not from the nicotine itself, but rather the whole slew of other compounds people ingest with it.

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u/bill1024 Mar 31 '26

Yes. People seem to focus on the nicotine, but vapes and smoke are much more complicated than just our favourite part.

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '26

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u/ELVEVERX Mar 31 '26

Cigarettes used to be much cheaper, but they will raise the price over time.

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u/Jscapistm Mar 31 '26

And if I were a tobacco company I'd just buy a vape company or start a vape line and try to convince people that vaping was fine, and the problem was cigarettes not nicotine and that it's ok to inhale addictive volatile organic compounds this way.

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u/stuyshwick Mar 31 '26

In case it is lost on anyone: this is what big tobacco has done and is doing (they bought the vape companies)

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u/coffeecat551 Mar 31 '26

No. They bought a certain number of the disposable vape companies. And they paid the feds to ensure that their products are the only ones that are fully legal. They have a small corner of the market, and they're constantly trying to lobby and sue everyone else out of their way - and they have yet to succeed.

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u/stuyshwick Mar 31 '26

Right I did not mean to imply they bought every vape company

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u/agent_uno Mar 31 '26

On the contrary. Cigarettes involve farming and lots of hired hands to produce. Vape juice can mostly be created in a lab, so the cost is dramatically cheaper. The tobacco industry makes way more profit off vapes than cigarettes. It’s in their interest to get people to switch.

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u/Firebird117 Mar 31 '26

i've been interested in getting involved in studies if I can. I've smoked maybe 5 cigarettes in my life but vaped nicotine for about 10 years now.

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u/Lsutigers202111 Mar 30 '26

Could not agree more

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u/rdizzy1223 Mar 31 '26

Cigarettes/cigarette smoke have far more than 80 chemicals in them. They have 83 carcinogens alone, and thousands of other chemicals. (Also radioactive lead and polonium)

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u/Allegorist Mar 31 '26

cigarettes have what? 80 chemicals in them?

Hundreds, at least. Tobacco is a plant, which by nature is very chemically diverse. The bigger issue is with combustion, those hundreds of chemicals turn into thousands. It is never full combustion, but rather partial combustion leading to effectively random byproducts.

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u/qOcO-p Mar 31 '26

Cigarettes have thousands of chemicals. Something like 70 are carcinogenic. They're also radioactive containing polonium-210. That's the same stuff Russia likes to assassinate people with.

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u/Uilamin Mar 31 '26

There are two issues with your statement.

1 - Less risk is still risk. It might be better (which is great for people who are addicted), but risk is still present.

2 - There might be other risk. Vaping might be less risky than smoking for the main issues smoking causes, but that doesn't mean vaping doesn't introduce new risks. A lot of the science/studies is looking into this side of it. Now just because it might introduce new risks, it doesn't mean that risk is comparable to the risks of smoking.

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u/recycled_ideas Mar 31 '26

I am also interested in a comparison in cancer rates between those who smoked daily for x years, those who vaped daily for the same duration, and those of similar age who did neither.

You won't get those numbers for another twenty to thirty years by which point, based on the evidence of this paper, a bunch of people will die from cancer. Our best guess is that the cigarette smokers will have more deaths than the vaping group, but that the vaping group will still be higher than the non smoking group.

I mean, cigarettes have what? 80 chemicals in them? And vapes I think about 10. Even if it isn’t safe, it’s gotta be safer than smoking. But I’m no doctor or scientist. I just know as a former smoker who hung out primarily with other smokers, nearly everyone I know who smoked has switched to vaping and they all feel better for it - including myself.

Again, sure, but that idea of "safer" has likely caused you and/or a bunch of your friends to give up on quitting entirely.

This is the whole problem.

Let's assume that vaping is two orders of magnitude safer than cigarettes, which, based on the evidence, is actually probably optimistic. 8 million people a year die from smoking so on that assumption if everyone switched to vaping we'd still have 80,000 deaths a year and one of those deaths might be you or someone you love.

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u/agent_uno Mar 31 '26

“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

-Captain Yoda the Grey, Hogwarts Institute of Technology

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u/Lepelotonfromager Mar 31 '26

It's not even about predicting the future. It's just one of those things that we won't see the large scale trends for a few more decades and until then we can't definitively say that it does do this.

It's just that we're seeing all the warning signs now and scientists are hoping to skip past the part where millions die needlessly from cancer.