While cigarette smoking rates may be falling, statistics have been showing a rise in the popularity of smoking tobacco with communal water-pipes called hookahs.
According to a new research review published in the journal Public Health Reports, hookahs are not a harmless alternative to cigarettes, as the water pipes unleash a large load of toxicants into users’ lungs.
In the study, scientists examined more than 540 scientific articles relevant to cigarette and hookah smoking and narrowed them down to just 17 scientific studies that included sufficient information on toxicants inhaled when smoking cigarettes or hookahs.
The study team saw that one hookah session provides about 125 times the smoke, 25 times the tar, 2.5 times the nicotine, and 10 times the carbon monoxide compared to a single cigarette.
“Our results show that hookah tobacco smoking poses real health concerns and that it should be monitored more closely than it is currently,” Dr. Brian A. Primack, assistant vice chancellor at the Univertisy of Pittsburgh’s Schools of the Health Sciences, said in a statement.
“For example, hookah smoking was not included in the 2015 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey System questionnaire, which assesses cigarette smoking, chewing tobacco, electronic cigarettes and many other forms of substance abuse.”
The study team admitted contrasting a hookah smoking session to smoking a single cigarette is a delicate comparison due to the variances in smoking patterns. For example, a regular cigarette smoker may smoke 20 cigarettes per day, while a regular hookah smoker may only take part in a few sessions each day.
Not a perfect comparison
“It’s not a perfect comparison because people smoke cigarettes and hookahs in very different ways,” Primack said. “We had to conduct the analysis this way—comparing a single hookah session to a single cigarette—because that’s the way the underlying studies tend to report findings. So, the estimates we found cannot tell us exactly what is ‘worse.’ But what they do suggest is that hookah smokers are exposed to a lot more toxicants than they probably realize.
“After we have more fine-grained data about usage frequencies and patterns, we will be able to combine those data with these findings and get a better sense of relative overall toxicant load,” he added.
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Feature Image: SGV FILMWORKS/Flickr
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