Use of social media to establish vapers puffing behaviour: Findings and implications for laboratory evaluation of e-cigarette emissions

Publication date: Available online 13 July 2019Source: Regulatory Toxicology and PharmacologyAuthor(s): Kevin McAdam, Anna Warrington, Alice Hughes, David Adams, Jennifer Margham, Carl Vas, Pete Davis, Sandra Costigan, Christopher ProctorAbstractThe recent growth in e-cigarette use has presented many challenges to Public Health research, including understanding the potential for e-cigarettes to generate toxic aerosol constituents during use. Recent research has established that the way e-cigarettes are puffed influences the magnitude of emissions from these devices, with puff duration the dominant driving force. Standardised puffing machine methods are being developed to harmonise testing approaches across laboratories, but critical to their success is the degree with which they accurately reflect vapers real-world puffing behaviours (topography). Relatively limited data is available examining the way vapers puff, with significant inconsistencies between studies. Here we report the creation and analysis of a large database of public-domain vaping videos to establish e-cigarettes puffing behaviour in near natural settings.Over 300 videos containing 1200 puffing events from 252 vapers were obtained from social media sources, divided approximately equally amongst cigalike, Ego and Advanced Personal Vapouriser (“APV”, also referred to as “boxmod”) types of e-cigarettes. Analysis showed that similar mean puff durations were found for all three categories of vaping devices....
Source: Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology - Category: Toxicology Source Type: research