With electronic cigarettes only being introduced into the market in 2006, researchers are still discovering just how much smoking vapor can impact users’ health.
Created as an alternative to smoking cigarettes, vaping has also become popular among college and high school students. In 2017–2019 study, 27 percent of 12th-graders reported vaping in the last 30 days (up from 16 percent in 2015), 22 percent of 10th-graders (up from 14 percent in 2015), 21 percent of college students (up from 9 percent in 2015), according to data from University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future survey.
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In February 2020, Dr. Purnima Kumar, a professor of periodontology and member of the American Dental Association, published “Living under a cloud” in the Journal of the American Dental Association. In it, Kumar wrote that despite available research on the impact e-cigarettes can have on health, information on its effects on “the oral cavity, such as periodontal disease, caries development, or oral cancer, is limited.”
“As we as we start talking about vaping and oral diseases, I think the most important thing to remember is that oral diseases are chronic diseases—they take a long time to manifest as clinical diseases and for us to measure them clinically takes time,” she says. “It’s not like the flu, for example, that you catch the infection today and you have a fever in two days and people know you have the flu. These diseases take a very, very long time.”
There are a few things researchers know for sure: “Vaping changes the pH, the acidity level, of your saliva. It impacts the type of bacteria that live in our mouth,” Kumar says. “The content of the vape aerosol also appears to increase the stickiness of our oral bacteria, how they stick to our teeth.” When all combined, she adds, researchers believe that it might increase the risk for cavities. In addition, people who vape “have lots of inflammatory molecules that are being secreted by the lining of their mouth,” Kumar says, indicating they’re at a much higher risk for chronic inflammatory diseases such as gum disease or oral cancer.
So without clinical data, the long-term effects are still up in the air. Says Kumar: “Remember, it took us 50 years to realize what cigarette smoking does to human health.”
For any further questions on the risks of vaping on oral health, visit mouthhealthy.org.
