Passive exposure to e-cigarette emissions: irritation symptoms, severity and duration

Abstract

Background The current study, part of the EU H2020 funded TackSHS project, aimed to test the hypothesis that passive exposure to e-cigarette emissions provokes systemic symptoms and to determine their severity and timing. Methods 30 nonsmokers, 18-35 years old, BMI0.70). Scores 1-5 were generated for the environmental, ocular, nasal, airway and general complaints by adding symptoms per system. Analysis was performed using Wilcoxon-signed rank sum test and Spearman correlation (p0.05). The increased scores for ocular, nasal and airway complaints were positively correlated with increased environmental scores at T 15 and T 30 . General complaint scores showed a tendency to increase at T 30 that was positively correlated with increased environmental scores at T 30 . Conclusions Short-term exposure of nonsmokers to e-cigarette emissions resulted in mild ocular, nasal and airway symptoms that persisted up to 30 minutes and were positively correlated with environmental indices. Further research is needed to investigate long-term health implications.

Keywords

• WCTOH