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As early as the 1880s, there was evidence that smoking tobacco damaged your lungs. But it took almost 100 years to definitively show that smoking causes lung cancer.

So, what about vapes?

Until now, most research that has looked at the cancer risk for people using vapes, also known as electronic or e-cigarettes, has mainly focused on their role as a gateway to smoking tobacco. This is because we know people who vape are more likely than non-smokers to take up smoking.

But whether they cause cancer by themselves has been unclear. There are still no long-term studies. But now a comprehensive review of the evidence I conducted with colleagues, published today, has found vaping likely causes oral and lung cancers.

Given there is no long-term research on whether vaping directly causes cancer, we had to look for effects on the body that we know are linked to cancer.

We identified all peer-reviewed research published between 2017 and mid-2025 that looked at health impacts of vapes considered indicative of potential cancer causation.

The aerosol that vapers inhale contains a complex range of chemicals, including nicotine and its byproducts, and vapourised metals. This aerosol demonstrates almost all of the ten “key characteristics of carcinogens” identified by the World Health Organization.

Blood and urine analyses from vapers confirmed they had...

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