Nicotine Vaping and Co-occurring Substance Use Among Adolescents in the United States from 2017–2019
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Vaping is not an isolated substance use behavior, and combined use with other products may potentiate harms by complicating intervention efforts, strengthening other substances’ effects, and increasing the physiological toll on adolescents. Adding to the negative effects of vaping, vaping nicotine is associated with use of cannabis, alcohol, and several other substances …Given the strong associations between nicotine use and both cannabis use and binge drinking, there is a need for sustained interventions, advertising and promotion restrictions, and national public education efforts to reduce adolescent nicotine vaping, efforts that acknowledge co-occurring use.
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Quality standards to be introduced to tackle youth vaping, including restricting flavours, colours and other ingredients
The Australian government will ban the importation of nonprescription vaping products – including those that do not contain nicotine – in the most significant tobacco and vaping control measures in the country in a decade.
To tackle youth vaping, minimum quality standards for vapes will be introduced including restricting flavours, colours and other ingredients. Vape products will require pharmaceutical-like packaging, and the allowed nicotine concentrations and volumes will be reduced. All single-use, disposable vapes will be banned.
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Adding menthol flavoring to electronic cigarettes may damage your lungs more than regular e-cigarettes do, a new study reveals.
A number of studies have suggested that e-cigarette vapor can cause lung inflammation, oxidative stress, DNA damage and airway hyper-responsiveness that can trigger asthma, Benam said. Vaping these substances can cause lung damage that impairs lung function. Menthol, he added, is such a toxic substance.
The common mint flavoring helps deliver lots more toxic microparticles, compared with e-cigarette pods that don't contain menthol. It's those microparticles that damage lung function, researchers say.
"Beware of additives in the e-cigarettes, if you vape, they can make you inhale more particles into your lungs. Don‘t assume that since menthol is a substance naturally found in mint plants and added to some food and beverages, it would be fine to inhale…Menthol flavoring leads to a significantly higher number of particle counts that one would take into their lungs by vaping them…E-cigarette aerosols are known to contain many harmful substances, such as nicotine and formaldehyde.”
Associate Professor Kambez Benam, Senior Researcher in the division of pulmonary, allergy and critical care medicine at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Medicine
(Source: Menthol Vapes Could Be Even More Toxic to Lungs (webmd.com))
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A drug known as ketamine induces a mental state similar to psychosis in healthy individuals by inhibiting NMDA receptors in the brain. This creates an imbalance of excitatory and inhibitory signals in the central nervous system, which affects sensory perception. Experts believe that similar changes in NMDA receptors could be linked to perception changes in schizophrenia.
They found that ketamine increased “background noise” in the brain, making sensory signals less defined or pronounced. This, they noted, may explain the distorted perception of reality among people with schizophrenia or psychosis.
The researchers suggested that their findings mean that the distorted reality experienced in psychosis and schizophrenia may be triggered by more background noise, which in itself may be caused by malfunctioning NMDA receptors causing an imbalance of inhibition and excitation in the brain.
Their findings appeared in the European Journal of Neuroscience (Trusted Source).
(Source: Psychosis after ketamine: What happens in the brain? (medicalnewstoday.com)
Further reading Ketamine and Staying Away From the ‘K-Hole’ and Problematic Psychedelics – Prescribing Harm?
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Warning of “history repeating,” researchers list ten problems with psychedelic research that make conclusions about efficacy and safety uncertain.
March 20, 2023
Drugs like ketamine, psilocybin (mushrooms), LSD, and MDMA are at the forefront of a new wave of overhyped treatments for mental health problems that may fail to deliver on their promises, according to a new article by researchers Michael van Elk and Eiko Fried at Leiden University, the Netherlands. They write that psychedelic research is plagued by methodological problems that make the efficacy and safety of these drugs uncertain.
Despite the minimal research and its limitations, the drugs have been hyped as “miracle” drugs, with some, like esketamine, even receiving FDA approval—despite failing to beat placebo in five of its six initial efficacy trials (the sixth trial reached statistical, but not clinical, significance). In fact, last year, researchers wrote that the promotion of ketamine/esketamine treatments poses “a significant risk to the public.”
In their new article, published before peer review on the preprint server PsyArXiv, van Elk and Fried focus on the top 10 methodological problems rampant in psychedelic research, how these issues undermine the evidence base, and how researchers can avoid them in the future.
“These problems threaten internal validity (treatment effects are due to factors unrelated to the treatment), external validity (lack of generalizability), construct validity (an unclear working mechanism), or statistical conclusion validity (conclusions do not follow from the data and methods),” the researchers write.
Worse, they add, most psychedelic studies feature more than one of these problems, which makes the studies far more unreliable: “These problems tend to co-occur in psychedelic studies, strongly limiting conclusions that can be drawn about the safety and efficacy of psychedelic therapy.”
Also see LOBBYING FOR MEDICINE – AROUND WE GO AGAIN (THIS TIME IT’S PSYCHEDELICS)