A Review of Current Knowledge and Guidelines on E-cigarettes: A Healthier Alternative to Classic Cigarettes or Equally Dangerous?

This review was written to summarize the current scientific findings on the safety of e-cigarettes and compare their impact on human disease incidence with that of conventional cigarettes. Due to the significant increase in the popularity of e-cigarettes, especially among adolescents and young adults, we began to wonder whether this form of smoking is actually safer and carries a lower risk of developing and progressing respiratory and circulatory diseases and whether vaping can in some way support users of classic cigarettes in the process of completely quitting smoking. To this end, we reviewed a number of studies published over the years in medical databases, concluding that despite the lower toxicity levels in e-cigarettes, the risk of lung cancer is the same as with conventional cigarettes. The main differences in disease risk occur in cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. E-cigarettes are characterized by a longer time to the onset of symptoms and changes in individual organs, which in turn slows disease progression. Furthermore, replacing conventional cigarettes with electronic cigarettes may reverse some of the changes in the vascular epithelium and reduce the severity of bronchial obstruction in patients with asthma. The fact that e-cigarettes, as a form of nicotine administration, have been developed relatively recently does not allow us to precisely determine the effects of their long-term use and still leaves many doubts that can be dispelled by long-term clinical studies and patient observations.