Lung Damage From Vaping Resembles Chemical Burns, Report Says

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The lung damage in some people who have become ill after vaping nicotine or marijuana products resembles a chemical burn, doctors from the Mayo Clinic reported on Wednesday. Their findings are based on samples of lung tissue from 17 patients around the country whose biopsy specimens were sent to Mayo to be examined under the microscope by experts in lung pathology. Two samples came from patients who died. The findings were published on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine and involved samples from 13 men and four women whose ages ranged from 19 to 67. About 70 percent had a history of vaping marijuana or cannabis oils. Eleven were in Arizona, five in Minnesota and one in Florida. Medical investigators have been unable to identify exactly what is causing the lung damage, or even how many harmful substances are involved. They do not know whether the source is the liquids being vaped, or a toxin released from the materials used to make vaping devices. It is also unclear whether some devices used in vaping may be defective. But Dr. Brandon T. Larsen, a surgical pathologist at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz, said the Mayo researchers saw no signs of oil accumulating in the lung tissue. Instead, they saw many immune cells called macrophages with what he described as “the fine, foamy-looking appearance that is characteristic of chemical injuries.” “So maybe we need to look more closely at the chemical compounds, and not just oils, but the chemical constituents, to figure out which ones are injurious,” Dr. Larsen said. “All 17 of our cases show a pattern of injury in the lung that looks like a toxic chemical exposure, a toxic chemical fume exposure, or a chemical burn injury,” said Dr. Brandon T. Larsen, a surgical pathologist at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz. “To be honest, they look like the kind of change you would expect to see in an unfortunate worker in an industrial accident where a big barrel of toxic chemicals spills, and that person is exposed to toxic fumes and there is a chemical burn in the airways.” Dr. Larsen likened the injuries to those seen in people exposed to poisons like mustard gas, a chemical weapon used in World War I.