Claim that Vaping Causes Heart Attacks is Completely Debunked

Astudy published last month in theJournal of the American Heart Association electronic cigarette use concluded that vaping is a cause of heart attacks, raising the risk of having a heart attack about two-fold. One of the co-authors publicized the study on his blog under the title " More evidence thate-cigs cause heart attacks. "This was a cross-sectional study using data from the baseline survey of the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) Study collected in 2013-2014. The investigators examined the relationship between respondents reporting that theyever had a heart attack and that they currently vaped. They found that people who vape were more likely to report ever having had a heart attack in the past.The problem with drawing a causal conclusion from this cross-sectional study is that there is no way to know which came first: the vaping or the heart attack. As I have previously argued, it is entirely possible that most of the vapers who reported having had a heart attack were people who experienced a heart attack and then began vaping in an effort to stay off of cigarettes. If this is the case, then it is not the vaping that is causing the heart attacks; instead, it is really the heart attacks " causing " the vaping. In epidemiology, we call this " reverse causation, " and it is a common limitation of cross-sectional studies, especially when they do not ask about the time course of exposures and outcomes.Based on what I saw as a likely possibility of reverse c...
Source: The Rest of the Story: Tobacco News Analysis and Commentary - Category: Addiction Source Type: blogs