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 Often, children aren’t seriously harmed, but several have had severe
complications like comas and seizures and one child died from liquid
nicotine poisoning.
Even small amounts of liquid nicotine can cause serious poisoning or
death in young children, said senior study author Dr. Gary Smith,
director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide
Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.
The study, which focused on poison center calls about kids under six
years old exposed to tobacco and nicotine, found e-cigarettes posed
the biggest risk to toddlers.
“Children in this age group are curious, have newfound mobility,
explore their environment by putting things in their mouth, and do
not recognize danger,” Smith added by email.
Big U.S. tobacco companies are all developing e-cigarettes. The
battery-powered gadgets feature a glowing tip and a heating element
that turns liquid nicotine and other flavorings into a cloud of
vapor that users inhale.
Smith and colleagues analyzed poison center data from January 2012
through April 2015. During that period, monthly calls related to
e-cigarettes surged from 14 to 223, they report in the journal
Pediatrics.
Overall, there were 4,128 calls about e-cigarettes, accounting for
about 14 percent of the roughly 29,000 total calls related to
children’s exposure to nicotine and tobacco during the study.
When kids got their hands on e-cigarettes, they were five times more
likely to be admitted to a health facility and more than twice as
likely to have serious medical problems compared to children exposed
to traditional cigarettes, the study found.
Most of the time, kids got their hands on e-cigarettes at home.
Typically, symptoms from drinking liquid nicotine - like vomiting,
nausea, and a rapid heartbeat - went away within a few hours.
Among the children who needed medical care, less than 3 percent were
hospitalized and roughly 2 percent had severe complications like
breathing difficulties, seizures and comas.
The study probably underestimates the risk of e-cigarettes, however,
because it only includes cases voluntarily reported to poison
control centers, the authors note. It’s also possible physicians
might be more inclined to report issues with e-cigarettes because
the devices and the resulting medical problems are relatively new.
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Even so, the findings should serve as a warning to parents because
drinking liquid nicotine can be much more toxic to kids than eating
tobacco found in traditional cigarettes, said Dr. Sean Patrick Nordt,
an emergency medicine researcher at the University of Southern
California Keck School of Medicine who wasn’t involved in the study.
Liquid nicotine is easier for the body to absorb than tobacco in
cigarettes, Nordt said by email. Because cigarette tobacco also
doesn’t taste very good, kids are less likely to ingest enough of it
to seriously hurt themselves.
By contrast, e-cigarettes “can look and smell like candy to
children,” Nordt added.
Nicotine is also much more concentrated in liquids than in
traditional cigarettes, noted Dr. Kyran Quinlan, a researcher at
Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and chair of the council
on injury, violence and poison prevention for the American Academy
of Pediatrics.
A cigarette has about 1-2 milligrams of nicotine, but liquid refills
for e-cigarettes are often contain at least 18 milligrams, Quinlan,
who wasn’t involved in the study, said by email.
“A small sip, say a teaspoon which is 5 milligrams, exposes a child
to the nicotine of several packs of cigarettes all at once,” Quinlan
said.
“Parents should know that the highly concentrated liquid nicotine
used in e-cigarettes is a new deadly poison,” Quinlan added. “The
packaging, colors and flavors make these toddler magnets. Young
children should have no access to e-cigarettes or their refill
liquids because it could kill them.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1Ok3g0f Pediatrics, online May 9, 2016.
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