New Article about the Harms of Vaping

A collaborative research effort by AME, the Keck School of Medicine of USC, the Huntington Medical Research Institute (HMRI), and UC Irvine has discovered that electronic cigarettes harm blood vessels while basic cigarettes damage the heart. This research, published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, employed a fluid dynamics-based technique to measure cardiovascular impacts caused by nicotine exposure from e-cigarettes and traditional cigarettes, using animal models. AME Professor Niema Pahlevan (whose laboratory was utilized for the study) explains how this technique can be used on human subjects: “…the smartphone camera captures images of the neck skin. Then an algorithm extracts vessel wall dilation from the skin vibrations recorded in the images. This dilation waveform mirrors the pressure waveform in large arteries, such as the carotid where wall viscoelasticity is minimal.” More information about this collaboration can be read in this article featured on Viterbi News.