Grant: Catalyst Grant: Health Effects of Vaping

Even though vaping was first promoted as a tool to help smokers quit smoking, it is now practiced by large number of the population independently form previous or current smoking. Vaping has also spread quickly among the youth. Unfortunately, it has been promoted commercially and had gained wide acceptance even though we know very little about any detrimental effects it may have on human health. Vaping exposes individuals to a large number of chemicals. Unfortunately many of those have not been tested appropriate before humans are allowed to inhale them. Many of these chemicals would be expected to cause inflammation in human tissues. Over the last few years there have been studies on the pro-inflammatory effects of vaping in cell cultures and in animal models, but very few studies in humans. Additionally, the few existing studies measured inflammation in the blood and not directly in the lung. Our objective is to describe the pro-inflammatory effects of vaping directly in the lungs. We will recruit healthy subjects that vape and others that do not and will expose all of them to an acute vaping session. We will analyze markers of airway and peripheral blood inflammation before and after the vaping session. We will compare differences in inflammatory markers between subjects that vape regularly and those that do not and changes of these markers after vaping. In follow up investigations we plan to study the pro-inflammatory effects of vaping in subjects with respiratory diseases.