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Use of electronic Cigarettes (eCig) has increased worldwide in the last several years. Its use has been reported to be an effective smoking cessation tool and for being healthier than normal cigarette use. Although these reports exist, they lack supportive scientific evidence. Little is known about eCig effects during pregnancy. In the present study, we wanted to determine the effects of eCig exposure at two different important gestational points during mouse pregnancy in order to determine eCig exposure effects during pregnancy. C57/Bl6 mice were exposed to eCig via a nose-only delivery system (Scireq) for 4 days (from 14.5 gestational day (dGA) to 17.5 dGA) or for 6 days (from 12.5 dGA to 17.5 dGA). At the time of necropsy (18.5 dGA) placental and fetal weights were recorded. Maternal blood pressure was determined with a tail occlusion cuff (Kent Scientific) and proteinuria was detrained with the dip stick method. Markers for placental apoptosis were also determined. Treatment with eCig showed: 1) a significant decrease in placental weight and fetal weight (p<0.05) following 4 and 6 days of exposure, 2) higher systolic (p<0.02) and diastolic (p<0.02) blood pressure following 6 days of exposure, 3) increased proteinuria after 6 days of exposure, and 4) differential expression apoptosis markers in the placenta after 4 and 6 days of exposures. We conclude that detrimental effects of eCig coincides with the length of maternal exposure. We confirmed that 4 days of exposure resulted in metrics common to IUGR while 6 days of exposure more closely resembled PE/IUGR pathology. These results could be beneficial in understanding the long-term effects of eCig exposure and the development of placental diseases. This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health grant number 1R15HD108743. This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2024 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.
Clark et al. (Wed,) studied this question.