UCSF has won a $20 million federal grant to fund research into the health effects of new tobacco products such as electronic cigarettes, the use of which, especially among teenagers, is raising alarm among public health experts.
The grant, which comes from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, is the second round of federal funding that UCSF has received for this kind of research. The first $20 million grant came in 2013, when the United States established its first Tobacco Centers of Regulatory Science at institutions around the country.
The research is meant to inform state and national policy around tobacco control, which has become newly complicated in recent years with the introduction of products marketed as “low-risk” compared with traditional cigarettes. That claim, say public health experts, is not backed by science.
Indeed, the FDA demanded last week that sellers of e-cigarettes make firm plans to stop selling the products to teens — a move that came at least in part due to research that has shown the products could draw young people into nicotine addiction. Certain e-cigarettes, including San Francisco’s Juul vaporizers, contain flavored nicotine to make the tobacco more palatable.
“The new grants are really built around developing a modern understanding of these products and how they compare with cigarettes,” said Stanton Glantz, director of the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. “E-cigarettes kind of arose over the last five years and really injected themselves into everything we’re doing. What we need to do is watch how the market evolves and stay on top of it.”
Among the research projects that will be funded at UCSF are: a study on how the components of e-cigarettes, such as the liquid flavoring, affect the lungs; the short-term cardiovascular effects of e-cigarettes; the cardiovascular effects of all types of heated tobacco products; how the products are used in rural high schools, where teenagers tend to have more access to them; and the impact of new tobacco products on health care costs.
Glantz said that given how widespread use of e-cigarettes like Juul has become among teenagers in recent years, research on those products is particularly critical. E-cigarette use among high school students shot up to 11 percent in 2016, from just 1.5 percent in 2011, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Some adults use e-cigarettes to help them quit smoking traditional cigarettes. The assumption is that e-cigarettes are less harmful, with lower levels of toxic substances inhaled. But researchers like Glantz aren’t convinced they are safer.
And the products clearly have taken hold among young people, raising concerns that they will be part of a new generation of nicotine addicts — a major setback after rates of tobacco use have been declining for decades.
“It’s a whole new world,” said Wendy Max, director of the Institute for Health and Aging in the UCSF School of Nursing. Part of the new grant will fund her research into health care costs associated with changes in tobacco use, including costs to insurers and health care providers, as well as costs to individuals in terms of out-of-pocket medical expenses and lost days of work.
“We were making such progress. Smoking rates were going down. Smoking was de-normalized. Young people weren’t taking it up,” Max said. “And then the industry got one step ahead of us.”
Erin Allday is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: firstname.lastname@example.org Twitter: @erinallday