In the summer of 2019, an infectious disease hit the United States. More than 2,800 people were hospitalized and 68 people died, U.S. health officials reported. The most common cause is that chemicals in some e-cigarettes can damage lung tissue, causing people to gasp and cough for air.

This explosion of lung damage has spurred researchers to investigate the health effects of e-cigarettes. Five years later, there is steadily growing evidence from large, long-term studies that e-cigarette use is associated with an increased risk of respiratory disease, heart attack, and stroke.

Now, a new study presented last week at the American College of Cardiology’s annual scientific meeting adds to these findings. Researchers found that people over the age of 18 who had used e-cigarettes at some point in their lives were 19 percent more likely to experience heart failure than those who had never used e-cigarettes. I discovered.

Unlike a sudden heart attack, heart failure occurs when the heart slowly weakens or stiffens and struggles to pump blood around the body.

“A growing body of research is linking e-cigarettes to adverse effects, suggesting they may not be as safe as previously thought,” said Yakub Bene Alhassan, a physician and researcher at MedStar Health in Baltimore. ”, he said in a statement after the results were announced. . “The difference we saw was significant.”

The prospective study is the largest of its kind to examine the link between e-cigarettes and heart failure, but it has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Bene-Alhasan and colleagues analyzed the health records of 175,667 U.S. adults participating in the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us research program. Of this sample, approximately 28,660 reported ever using e-cigarettes, and 3,242 experienced heart failure over a median of approximately 4 years of follow-up data collected.

People who had already recorded one episode of heart failure at the start of the study were excluded from the analysis, and the researchers adjusted for other factors associated with heart failure, including age, gender, and diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and smoking. situation.

Approximately 60 percent of participants were female, most were white, and the average age was 52 years. Prior to this, large-scale studies typically focused on young adults, who had relatively low rates of heart attack and stroke.

Compared to people who had never smoked e-cigarettes, former and current e-cigarette users had a 19% increased risk of heart failure, particularly a type of heart failure in which the heart muscle becomes stiff and doesn’t fill with blood properly. The researchers did not ask how often they used e-cigarettes or whether the e-cigarettes they used contained ingredients such as nicotine or flavorings.

“What we suspected about e-cigarettes may be true: There is some harm associated with e-cigarettes themselves related to the nicotine intake,” said Yuming Nee, a cardiologist at California’s Memorial Care Heart and Vascular Institute. I am concerned that this may happen.” he told Healthline.

Nicotine is highly addictive, and we know that young people who vape are three times more likely to start smoking. There is also little evidence that nicotine e-cigarettes help people quit smoking.

Additionally, e-cigarettes labeled “nicotine-free” often contain nicotine. Research shows that e-cigarettes that don’t contain nicotine can also damage lung tissue and blood vessels. The next destination for the lungs and bloodstream is the heart, but more research is needed to determine which compounds are causing the harm.

Among the 28,660 e-cigarette users, those who reported smoking cigarettes had a 59 percent increased risk of heart failure compared to those who vaped but did not smoke.

But Nee pointed out that this latest observational study only points to a link between e-cigarette use and heart failure, adding: “All we can say is that there is no link between these two things. It just means that there is.”

Other researchers not involved in the study want future studies to examine how often people use e-cigarettes and the relative risk of heart failure at different levels of exposure.

“I think this study has been long overdue, especially given how much attention e-cigarettes are getting,” Bene-Alhassan said.

“Further research will reveal more about the potential health effects and improve the information available to the public.”

Research results are available at: Journal of the American College of Cardiologybut has not yet been peer-reviewed.