Stanton Glantz is the Distinguished Professor of Tobacco Control, and director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine. Glantz is also the Andrew Wakefield of the anti-vaping movement. In keeping with that awesome responsibility, the Distinguished Professor has come out with another retraction worthy analysis claiming non-combustible nicotine devices are more dangerous than cigarettes.
This time his research paper in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine is, as NBC News puts it: is "the first study on the long-term health effects of electronic cigarettes finds that the devices are linked to an increased risk of chronic lung diseases." (Chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder or COPD, emphysema, asthma, and chronic bronchitis.)
As NBC reports: "The study included 32,000 adults in the U.S. None had any signs of lung disease when the study began in 2013. By 2016, investigators found people who used e-cigarettes were 30 percent more likely to have developed chronic lung disease, including asthma, bronchitis and emphysema, than nonusers."
Having some who his healthy getting lung disease less than three years after vaping is pretty remarkable. But Glantz told the New York Post:
"E-cigarette use predicted the development of lung disease over a very short period of time. It only took three years."
In fact, Glantz asserts: "Everybody, including me, used to think e-cigarettes are like cigarettes but not as bad. If you substitute a few e-cigarettes for cigarettes, you're probably better off…It turns out you're worse off. E-cigarettes pose unique risks in terms of lung disease."
The conclusion that short term vaping causes lung disease is biologically implausible.
COPD and other severe lung diseases often take years to develop and often escape diagnosis until they are relatively advanced.
As many as 1 out of 4 Americans with COPD never smoked cigarettes. In fact, "never smokers account for 23% of the total COPD burden. Among these obstructed never-smokers, 19% reported a prior diagnosis of asthma alone, and 12.5% reported COPD (solely or with asthma), leaving 68.5% with no prior respiratory diagnosis. "
And even among smokers, it takes at least a decade or longer of consistent smoking for COPD to develop. Most studies (ignored by Glantz) conclude that "prolonged tobacco use is associated with respiratory symptoms and COPD after controlling for current smoking behavior."
For example a longitudinal study examining the risk of developing COPD in a general population found that after 25 years of smoking, at least 25% of smokers without initial disease will have clinically significant COPD and 30–40% will have any COPD.
Moreover, there is no clinical evidence that COPD rapidly emerges. On the contrary, the most recent research suggests that disease severity (degree of impairment) should be distinguished from disease activity (rate of progression) since there is no one factor that triggers either. So unless Glantz has discovered a novel biological mechanism triggered by vaping, his claims are absurd.
The same goes for asthma, chronic bronchitis and emphysema. A large percentage of people have conditions and often go undiagnosed for years. Indeed, Glantz when he claims that the population studied didn't have lung disease at the outset, he is being deceptive. They didn't have a diagnosis in the past 12 months. That's different than not having it all.
In fact, Glantz fails to compare the prevalence of these diseases in vapers vs the rest of the population. That's because adults who had asthma have an 11 times greater risk of COPD (independent of smoking) than those that don't. Glantz doesn't bother controlling for this important factor.
Age-specific and age-adjusted* percentage of adults aged ≥18 years with COPD, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 2017
Ever had asthma Current Smokers Former Smokers
Yes 19.5 11.2
No 4.1 1.6
Source: Wheaton AG, Liu Y, Croft JB, et al. Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease and Smoking Status — United States, 2017. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2019;68:533–538. http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6824a
There's more. Glantz did not control for other smoking characteristics that matter (dual users are heavier smokers). As Peter Hajek, a professor of clinical psychology and the director of the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine's Tobacco Dependence Research Unit at Queen Mary University of London pointed out in a email to me: “He didn't compare the relationship of vaping with other products and approaches for reducing smoking (such as counseling, patches, and medications) on lung disease. That data is available too.”
In addition to these flawed assumptions and approaches, Glantz still refuses to show whether other variables or factors that he doesn’t analyze can explain the relationship he claims to show. Anyone making a claim about causality has a duty to find and disclose all the relevant factors just as a district attorney is required not to hide evidence to convict a defendant. As Chelsea Boyd at R Street wrote to me: (Glantz) “does not show a full interaction analysis, likely because it would remove the association between e-cigarettes and his disease du jour. It's also telling that some of his associations don't make any sense if you consider the larger context.”
Indeed, his effort to discount the possibility of having lung disease might cause someone to try vaping backfires. Glantz notes, "this study assessed the possibility of reverse causality by estimating the odds of initiating e-cigarette use... combined as a function of having respiratory disease among people who had never used e-cigarettes (previously).” In fact, that analysis shows, as the article states, that "having respiratory disease at significantly predicted future e-cigarette use (p<0.001),” Incredibly Glantz claims the opposite is true.
Finally, this is NOT the first study to look at the long-term effect of vaping on lung disease. There are others, and unlike Glantz, they actually study real people over time.
One recent study found that e-cigarette (ECs) "use may aid smokers with COPD reduce their cigarette consumption or remain abstinent, which results in marked improvements in annual exacerbation rate as well as subjective and objective COPD outcomes." That was followed by another analysis in 2018 that concluded, "EC use may ameliorate objective and subjective COPD outcomes and that the benefits gained may persist long-term. EC use may reverse some of the harm resulting from tobacco smoking in COPD patients.
Meanwhile, as they did in using Wakefield’s bogus studies claiming the measles vaccine caused autism, the incurious media now claim that Glantz’ research "adds to a growing body of evidence that vaping can cause physical harm, whether it's chemical burns to lung tissue, toxic metals that leave lasting scars on lungs, vitamin E oil that clogs lungs or even overheated batteries that explode.
Whether any of that evidence can be used for something other than fearmongering is a different question. As the saying goes: Glantz in, garbage out. Or something like that.
