Hospitals and Healthcare

The rise of vaping comes after at least two decades of great success in decreasing smoking rates across the country, and has health experts concerned that those gains could be reversed.

Most e-cigarettes contain nicotine, which is highly addictive and especially harmful to young people, whose brains are still developing. (The human brain is still developing until you turn 25 or so.) Nicotine can harm the parts of the brain that handle memory, attention and learning.

It’s also illegal for minors to vape. (A growing number of states have even raised the vaping age to 21.) And using e-cigarettes may make teenagers more likely to smoke real cigarettes in the future. Dr. Rizzo noted that the vast majority of current smokers became addicted before they were 18.

Vaping water should be a harmless, if curious, thing to do. Adding nicotine to that vapor, on the other hand, noticeably affects the cardiovascular system and brain. The addictive properties of nicotine can alter neural functioning permanently, especially in younger people—that’s why every medical institution advises against vaping. But nicotine alone should not acutely cause the sort of severe inflammatory lung disease that is being seen.