Claire Reid
A psychologist has spoken about the harmful impact vaping can have on those who are addicted.
While vaping is considered an effective way to get people to quit smoking, concerns have been raised about those who were never smokers picking up the habit - particularly children and young people, as hospital admissions for children due to vaping quadrupled in a year.
Last year, the UK Government launched a consultation amid concerns that a generation of children are becoming addicted to vaping as the habit has exploded in popularity.
In March last year, a Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson told LADbible: "While vaping is a preferable alternative to smoking for adults, we are concerned about the rise in youth vaping, particularly the increasing use of disposable vaping products.
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"We are exploring a range of measures to address this – including clamping down on children accessing vapes illegally, and those who are getting them hooked on nicotine.
"It’s right for the government to do all it can to protect children from addiction."
Now, Australian Claire Wakefield, a researcher and psychologist from the Minderoo Foundation, appeared on Abbie Chatfield's It's A Lot podcast where she revealed some of the negative effects of vaping that she sees.
Revealing a red flag about when a habit has become an addiction, she said: “The clues for me that I reckon are worrying, is when you start thinking about it when you don't want to think about it.
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“You wake up in the morning and the first thing you think is, ‘Where's my vape?’ Or if you get, like, anxiety about wondering where I'm going to get my next one.”
However, Wakefield went on to describe a more worrying impact: nicotine poisoning, or ‘nic sick’ as it’s dubbed.
She said: “The ones that hit home for me - where there's tons of evidence - is acute nicotine toxicity, which they call ‘nic-sick’. That's essentially when you have too much nicotine at once.”
According to the American Lung Association (ALA), vapes and pure liquid nicotine contain higher amounts of nicotine than cigarettes, which can increase your risk of nicotine poisoning.
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Those who have nicotine poisoning could be met with a host of grim symptoms such as nausea and vomiting, dizziness, headaches, confusion, diarrhoea, shallow breathing and extreme fatigue - and in some cases it can even be fatal.
Wakefield went on to describe one particularly grim case in which a young woman started to throw up strawberry-flavoured vomit.
“She says she knew she had a problem when her vomit started tasting like vape,” she told the shocked podcast host.
“Strawberry-flavoured vomit, because she'd had so much vape. If you Google ‘Vape burns’, it's not pretty.” Not pretty at all.