Feb. 12--One of the hottest new alternatives to smoking -- electronic cigarettes -- may deliver little of the nicotine they promise, a study at Virginia Commonwealth University is finding.
And because they lack the jolt of tobacco cigarettes, users may be modifying the electronic devices to deliver more toxic nicotine, VCU researcher Thomas Eissenberg said yesterday.
The study, to be presented this month at an academic conference, also suggests that e-cigarettes, when used according to directions, don't suppress the craving to smoke very much, Eissenberg said.
"These data scream out for the need for regulation of these devices," said Eissenberg, who is director of VCU's Clinical Behavioral Pharmacology Laboratory.
"They say they are giving people nicotine, but based on our study, with the two brands we looked at and tested the way we did, that's not clear."
Nicotine is the addictive compound that hooks tobacco users.
E-cigarettes use small heaters to vaporize a mix of nicotine and alcohol, usually propylene glycol, a common ingredient in antifreeze, for a smoker to inhale. Because e-cigarettes do not burn tobacco leaf, users believe they avoid the toxins and cancer-causing compounds in cigarette smoke.
"There's millions of people who use e-cigarettes, and he's studied 16," said Amy A. Linert, a spokeswoman for the Electronic Cigarette Association.
Eissenberg tested nicotine in the smokers' blood streams after they used two different kinds of e-cigarettes, as well as after smoking.
He said the results from the first 16 were so surprising that he fired off a letter to the journal Tobacco Control with his preliminary findings. The letter is being published in this month's edition of the journal. He'll present the full results to the Society for Research in Nicotine and Tobacco this month.
His blood tests found smokers averaged 16.8 nanograms of nicotine per milliliter of blood plasma five minutes after smoking conventional cigarettes, but only 2.5 nanograms or 3.4 nanograms with the e-cigarette devices.
While nicotine affects heartbeat, he noticed an increase only after his subjects smoked tobacco but not after using the e-cigarettes.
The only significant reduction in craving for a cigarette came, briefly, after his subjects tried one variety of e-cigarette within an hour of their first attempt.
"We have hundreds of thousands of customers, and their collective experience and purchasing decisions strongly indicate that our products meet the needs of people interested in an alternative to combustible, smoke-producing cigarettes," said Jack Leadbeater, chief executive officer of NJOY, the company that made one of the two devices Eissenberg tested.
Leadbeater said half his company's sales are to repeat customers, and that 94 percent of customers say they continued using the product after their first trial.
Eissenberg said he's concerned about how people are using the devices.
"If people are reporting what they are reporting about cravings, the data suggest it's not because of the drugs in the device," he said.
But Eissenberg said he's concerned about comments he has seen on blogs that some e-cigarette users are "dripping," or letting liquid from the devices' cartridges fall directly onto the heating element.
That means they may be getting relatively large doses of nicotine, which can be toxic in amounts of about 50 milligrams, Eissenberg said.
While the cartridges contain 16 milligrams, they can be refilled from bottles labeled as containing 500 milligrams, or 10 times the toxic dose, he said.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has seized imports of e-cigarettes, saying they are unapproved drug-delivery devices. NJOY and another firm are challenging those seizures in federal court.
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Contact David Ress at (804) 6496051 or dress@timesdispatch.com.
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