Cherry-Flavoured Electronic Cigarettes Show High Levels of Benzaldehyde

Sales of electronic cigarettes are increasing year-on-year as consumers turn to e-cigarettes in their quest to stop smoking cigarettes. But the safety of e-cigarettes is still an open question?

In the United Kingdom, Public Health England — one of the main bodies that oversees the country’s health — issued a report that included amongst the key findings that:

the current best estimate is that e-cigarettes are around 95% less harmful than smoking.

The crucial words in that statement are current best estimate — as e-cigarettes are relatively new and any potential harms due to long-term use are unknown.

When an issue has important health concerns, the right thing to do is to carry out further tests and report the findings. A recent study carried out by scientists at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute and published in the British Medical Journal Thorax has done just that — and the results caused a small furore.

Benzaldehyde — aromatic aldehyde

The team focussed on the chemical benzaldehyde — a common enough chemical present in many natural food flavourings. With the majority of e-cigarettes being flavoured, the team wanted to know whether the aerosol generated by e-cigarettes — and inhaled by users — contained benzaldehyde and at what level.

Although benzaldehyde is considered safe to use as a food flavouring and in cosmetics, its use as an additive in e-cigarettes has raised concerns. Studies have shown that benzaldehyde can cause irritation to the airways in animal and occupational studies — so its concentration in e-cigarette aerosols is Important.

What did they find?

The researchers purchased 145 e-cigarette solutions in a wide variety of flavours that could be grouped into flavour-groups including berry, tobacco, chocolate and cherry. They used a refillable e-cigarette to generate an aerosol and for each experiment a total of 30 ‘puffs’ were taken.

The aerosol was captured on sorbent tubes, before being desorbed and analysed using high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) by a US Environmental Protection Agency recommended method. HPLC is one of the commonest analytical methods used in laboratories worldwide — some of the recent developments are discussed in the article, Recent Trends and Advances in Superficially Porous Particle Technology:  Application to Large Molecule Separations.

Benzaldehyde was detected in 108 of the samples — but the main story was the benzaldehyde concentration cherry flavoured samples. These samples had a significantly higher benzaldehyde concentration than any of the other samples — indeed, the benzaldehyde concentration from cherry e-cigarettes was frequently higher than the benzaldehyde concentration of conventional cigarettes.

A big kerfuffle

The higher benzaldehyde in cherry result led to some possibly over-zealous headlines in some sections of the media — which drew a rapid response from the e-cigarette media lobby.

It should be remembered that this is one result, and as the papers authors point out, there is still much uncertainty surrounding the long-term effects of e-cigarettes. Perhaps the most sensible suggestion comes from the papers authors:

clinicians need to be aware of this emerging risk and ask their patients about use of flavoured e-cigarettes.