Vaping Might Cause Seriously Aggressive Lung Cancer

As a former cigarette smoker who turned to vaping, and then spent years trying to get off vaping, I can tell you exactly how it all works.

In theory, switching from inhaling tobacco smoke to e-liquid vapor should be like switching from tequila to soda. Yeah, there’s still some inherent risk, but at least it’s not as bad…right? Maybe not, and the science might finally be trickling in on just how dangerous vaping in itself can be.

For one man in New Jersey, the supposedly “healthier” option may have helped speed up his death. According to a recent case report in the American Journal of Case Reports, a 51-year-old who smoked about a pack a day for 10 years, and then switched to vaping, which he did for about 11 years, developed a ruthless, fast-moving lung cancer.

One day, he began coughing up blood. Not a good sign, as all movies with characters who try to conceal the blood that they coughed into a handkerchief can tell you.

He got checked out. He was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma, a form of non-small cell lung cancer that had already spread to his heart. Surgery was off the table. Chemo didn’t help. He died three weeks after diagnosis.

This Case of Lung Cancer in a Longtime Vaper Has Doctors Spooked

The man’s last chest x-ray, which was two years prior, showed nothing abnormal. Given the aggressiveness of the cancer, how he had been off tobacco for a while, and his relatively young age, the doctors treating him think vaping might’ve played a role.

The report’s authors stop short of establishing a full-blown link between vaping and cancer, but they suggest that there might be something there and that other research teams look into it more closely.

Current research still doesn’t show a clear-cut cancer risk in people who vape and never smoked. Most studies agree that vaping is less harmful than smoking. But this case suggests that “less harmful” doesn’t mean harmless.

Vaping could carry its own set of unique risks we don’t fully understand yet, and may not for years, when doctors start to see a larger pattern of a specific type of illness cropping up over and over again, with vaping being the common link.