The next time someone offers you their e-cigarette, you might want to think twice before taking a puff. You’re not just vaping water with some added flavoring. You’ll be inhaling a cloud of other ingredients, too, such propylene glycol and vegetable glycerine. These are generally thought to be safe for use in food. But we don’t know that it’s safe to pull them into our lungs. Vape liquids also contain metals, formaldehyde and other toxic ingredients. But among the most concerning ingredients in most vape liquids is nicotine.
Explainer: What are e-cigarettes?
“A lot of teens get their vaping products from their friends,” says Suchitra Krishnan-Sarin. She is an addiction psychiatrist at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. “They don’t necessarily purchase them or do the research on them,” she points out. And that means they don’t know what they’re inhaling when they start to puff.
Krishnan-Sarin studies teen vaping. She’s found that teens are most likely to use non-refillable (also known as closed system) devices. These small, easy-to-hide products — such as JUUL and Puff Bar — don’t create an obvious vape cloud. This makes them easy to use almost anywhere. In fact, Krishnan-Sarin says, “Kids would tell us they were using these products in the classroom.”
Before COVID (the last time she was able to study teen vaping habits), many teens “were puffing on [an e-cigarette] almost constantly throughout the day,” she says.
That’s a concern. “None of these closed-system products come without nicotine,” Krishnan-Sarin notes. In fact, a single JUUL pod contains the same amount of nicotine as a pack of cigarettes. Both JUUL and Puff Bar also use a salt form of nicotine that gives each puff a smoother feel. That makes it more pleasurable.
Teens are “very sensitive to low levels of nicotine,” Krishnan-Sarin reports. “They also get addicted to nicotine a lot faster,” she notes. Vaping as a teen leads to long-term changes in the brain. These often lead to nicotine addiction. Those changes also can prime the brain for addiction problems with other types of drugs.Nicotine is highly addictive. It’s the reason three in every four people who start smoking or vaping as a teen continue to do so as adults. That addiction is also what makes it so hard to stop.
Nicotine acts directly on cells in the brain. Some neurons have receptors that bind with nicotine. When someone inhales nicotine, it travels to the brain. There it binds to these receptors. This releases a flood of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that creates upbeat, happy feelings. This positive sensation makes people want to use nicotine again. But over time, it takes more nicotine to get that same reward. That sets up a cycle of craving and use that leads to addiction.
Puff Bar e-cigarettes have become especially popular among teens. The company introduced a new version of its products in 2021 with synthetic nicotine to avoid FDA’s regulation of products using tobacco-derived nicotine.JOE RAEDLE/STAFF/GETTY IMAGES NEWS
Robert Smith is a retired neuroscientist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. His lab was among the first to study the effects of nicotine on the adolescent brain. His team examined individual brain cells in rats that had been exposed to nicotine. “We can’t do these kinds of studies with humans,” he notes. But “the brain chemistry of humans and rats is very, very similar.”
In a 2007 study, his team found that young rats (the equivalent of human teenagers) were more sensitive to nicotine than were adults. What’s more, it took just one dose to alter the young rat’s reward system. That’s the brain network that uses dopamine to create positive feelings. And this brain rewiring lasted into adulthood.
It’s not just the reward system that changes, Smith has found. Rats given nicotine as adolescents don’t respond to stress as well as adults do. They’re afraid of new situations. Generally, they “act fearful and anxious,” he found. Those changes in behavior were linked to changes in brain connections.Nicotine is highly addictive. It’s the reason three in every four people who start smoking or vaping as a teen continue to do so as adults. That addiction is also what makes it so hard to stop.
Nicotine acts directly on cells in the brain. Some neurons have receptors that bind with nicotine. When someone inhales nicotine, it travels to the brain. There it binds to these receptors. This releases a flood of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that creates upbeat, happy feelings. This positive sensation makes people want to use nicotine again. But over time, it takes more nicotine to get that same reward. That sets up a cycle of craving and use that leads to addiction.
Puff Bar e-cigarettes have become especially popular among teens. The company introduced a new version of its products in 2021 with synthetic nicotine to avoid FDA’s regulation of products using tobacco-derived nicotine.JOE RAEDLE/STAFF/GETTY IMAGES NEWS
Robert Smith is a retired neuroscientist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. His lab was among the first to study the effects of nicotine on the adolescent brain. His team examined individual brain cells in rats that had been exposed to nicotine. “We can’t do these kinds of studies with humans,” he notes. But “the brain chemistry of humans and rats is very, very similar.”
In a 2007 study, his team found that young rats (the equivalent of human teenagers) were more sensitive to nicotine than were adults. What’s more, it took just one dose to alter the young rat’s reward system. That’s the brain network that uses dopamine to create positive feelings. And this brain rewiring lasted into adulthood.
It’s not just the reward system that changes, Smith has found. Rats given nicotine as adolescents don’t respond to stress as well as adults do. They’re afraid of new situations. Generally, they “act fearful and anxious,” he found. Those changes in behavior were linked to changes in brain connections.
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