Yahoo News Flavoured vapes 'could become toxic when heated' new study using artificial intelligence suggests
Flavoured vapes could prove highly toxic when heated, according to a new study.
In a high-tech approach that could help uncover longer-term health risks of vaping, researchers used artificial intelligence to simulate the effects of heating the chemicals found in 180 flavours of e-liquid. And they found that 505 hazardous chemicals - 127 of them acutely toxic and 153 of them health hazards - formed as a result of vaping, reports The Mirror.
There is a huge range of liquid flavourings available in e-cigarettes. The original source of these lies in the food industry, where they are safe, but the study suggests they were not intended to be heated to high temperatures and inhaled as vapour.
The study's authors - Donal O'Shea and Dan Wu, from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and Akihiro Kishimoto from the IBM Research company in Tokyo, Japan - wrote: "The aerosols produced by e-cigarette vaping contain immensely complex uncharacterised mixtures of pyrolysis products, the health implications of which are, as yet, mostly unidentified.
"In advance of health effects of vaping becoming apparent in the general population, AI can be exploited to give guidance to the public, policy makers and health care professionals." They added: "As vaping is a new and unprecedented stress to the human body, with the ability to generate pyrolysis products more toxic that their parent compounds, it seems prudent to strictly limit the number of chemical entities in e-liquids."
Jacob George, professor of cardiovascular medicine and therapeutics at the University of Dundee, was not involved in the study but said of it: "There are close to 40,000 different flavours in the market worldwide today and making sense of their effects will require a combination of techniques including automated mapping algorithms and creation of neural networks such as this.
"While this study cannot give us definitive answers of the risks of flavoured vapes on human health, this study may be a helpful early step to identifying signals that could then lead to further, more in-depth research into heat-induced breakdown of chemicals used in flavourings." He added: "This study has combined artificial intelligence with previously known published information to predict that when heating a combination of chemicals in flavoured vapes there might result in a harmful toxicant being produced, and these predictions can then be tested with further studies.
"There is, as yet, very little good-quality evidence of either safety or harm of these flavourings and so I welcome novel strategies as employed by these researchers." The findings are published in the Scientific Reports journal.
