AUSTIN (KXAN) — With nearly one in five Texas high schoolers admitting to vaping, the American Lung Association is asking parents to start a conversation with their kids about e-cigarettes.
Last month the organization launched a campaign called “You’re the Best Person to Talk to Your Kids,” offering tips for parents on how to bring up vaping and facts about the health effects.
Those impacts can include irreversible lung damage, lifelong nicotine addiction, and problematic brain development, according to the ALA.
KXAN’s Tom Miller talked with American Lung Association Dr. Jamie Rutland about what parents should know and how they can help.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Tom: A lot of parents might not know where to start when it comes to having a conversation about vaping. Can you walk us through that?
Dr. Rutland: I have 11-year-old and nine-year-old little girls. So when I’m having this conversation, I just simply bring it up in the car. I just say to my kids, ‘hey, listen, does anyone at your school vape? Does anyone at your school have a pocket device that they put their mouth around and they inhale?’ And then I ask them, ‘what do you think that does? What do you think is going on there?’ And then, because kids are inquisitive, they start trying to answer the question. Me, being a lung doctor, it’s a lot easier to explain how the lung works. Essentially, the lungs are a bunch of pipes that lead to a bunch of balloons stacked on top of each other. When you inhale a substance that’s in the vape, it can actually damage some of those pipes leading to inflammation, and even damage some of those balloons, leading to inflammation, which can lead to shortness of breath. I just keep it really simple and introduce that conversation.
Tom: There’s a perception that vaping is not as dangerous as smoking cigarettes. What’s the truth there, and what are the health risks?
Dr. Rutland: Vaping has its own consequences because of the way that the vape pen is designed. So you’ve got this liquid cartridge, you’ve got a heating element, and you’ve got metal. Every time you inhale, you’re heating up that liquid, making that vapor so that metal is getting heated up. Because you’re inhaling pieces of this metal, it can lead to significant inflammation. It can lead to what we call the hypersensitivity pneumonitis, which is inflammation of those balloons of your lungs. Some of the products that are produced can even tell your cells to change into cancer cells. Those are called carcinogens, and that’s the problem with vaping. There are so many different things that can happen to those products, meaning that it can affect your body in so many different ways, and that’s the issue, and that’s why we want to raise awareness.
Tom: Your new campaign is called You’re the Best Person to Talk to Your Kids. Why are you launching it now, and what impact do you hope it’ll have?
Dr. Rutland: There are over 2 million kids that are vaping in the United States, and when you look particularly at Texas, it’s 18.7% of high schoolers vape. Our campaign aims to raise awareness about the risks associated with youth vaping and help parents start important conversations with their kids to prevent them from becoming addicted to E-cigarettes. Again, you’re the best person to talk to your kids about vaping. So if you go to talkaboutvaping.org you can really obtain the tools necessary to be able to have these conversations with your children.