the risk of death from cancer does not decrease

Over the last few years, the electronic cigarette or ‘vaper‘has been positioned in the collective imagination as ‘the lesser sea’ that has been sold as a transition tool, supposedly cleanerfor those smokers who were looking to get away from tobacco. However, science has been narrowing the gap on the long-term effects of electronic cigarettes for some time.

A new study. Here the last blow has been dealt by a study published in Nature that It is considered the largest made to dateand which concludes that the use of electronic cigarettes after giving up traditional tobacco does not have any type of benefit when it comes to reducing the chances of having lung cancer.

Unprecedented. To understand the magnitude of the finding, you have to look at the scale, since historically, one of the big problems when investigating vaping has been the lack of temporal perspective due to not having been on the market for too long and, above all, the size of the study population.

This has been resolved with this new study that has analyzed data from between 4.3 and 4.5 million people in South Korea, with exhaustive follow-up until December 2021. Many of these might think that changing smoke for steam neutralized the oncological risk, but in the end it is quite the opposite.

Your results. When analyzing incidence and mortality rates, researchers found that former smokers who switched to vaping had worse prognoses than those who quit smoking completely. Specifically, the relative risk of suffering from lung cancer increases by 56% compared to those who abandon any type of inhaled product.

In addition, the probability of death from lung cancer is double when giving up tobacco and taking an electronic cigarette instead of giving up any type of inhaled consumption.

Regarding time. Ex-smokers who had only been smoking for five years and switched to vaping instead of quitting had a 23% higher incidence of cancer and a 71% higher risk of death. But if we talk about established ex-smokers who spent more than five years smoking, their risk of death becomes 2.7 times higher.

In the case of ex-smokers who had been smoking for 20 years or more, switching to vaping led to a 65% increase in incidence and multiplied the risk of mortality by 4.5 times.

Because. These epidemiological data are not an isolated case, but rather confirm what toxicology has been warning for years in laboratories, since although vaping eliminates the tar and direct combustion of tobacco, the aerosols are far from being harmless.

A study published in 2026 pointed out that electronic cigarettes with nicotine are, with a high probability, carcinogenic to humans. And the answer is in the carcinogenic substances such as nitrosnornicotine, heavy metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and aldehydes such as formaldehyde.

In Xataka | It’s never too late to quit smoking: the lungs have an incredible capacity to regenerate