Summary
Introduction:
This text provides an overview of a study investigating the DNa methylation profile of e-cigarette use. The study aims to understand the potential biological impact and health risks of e-cigarette use by comparing the methylation profiles of vapers, smokers, and non-smokers. The researchers also developed and tested a methylation score for predicting e-cigarette use and assessed its ability to distinguish lung tumor from normal tissue.
Key points:
* The study recruited vapers, smokers, and non-smokers from the UK general population, with vapers defined as having used e-cigarettes at least weekly for the past 6 months and having smoked less than 100 times in their lifetime.
* The study investigated associations between e-cigarette use and previously-developed methylation scores used to predict smoking-related disease and mortality, and biological aging.
* The researchers identified differentially methylated regions (DMRs) between vapers and non-smokers, smokers and non-smokers, and vapers and smokers.
* There was limited overlap in the top CpGs identified in the three EWaS, and only one DMR was found in common between at least two of the EWaS models.
* The methylation score for e-cigarette use performed poorly at discriminating vapers from non-smokers in both the internal and external validation sets.
* The smoking methylation score showed better discrimination of tumor and adjacent normal tissue in lung squamous cell cases compared with the e-cigarette methylation score.
* The study suggests that e-cigarette use does not impact saliva methylation in the same way as cigarette smoking and that the methylation profile for e-cigarettes did not replicate in independent samples and was not able to discriminate cancer from normal tissue.
Main message:
The study findings suggest that e-cigarette use does not have the same impact on saliva methylation as cigarette smoking. The methylation profile for e-cigarettes was largely distinct from that of smoking, did not replicate in independent samples, and was unable to discriminate cancer from normal tissue. however, further studies are required to detect a robust methylation signature for long-term e-cigarette use and to investigate the extent to which methylation related to e-cigarette use translates into chronic effects and relevant health outcomes.
Citation
Richmond RC, Sillero-Rejon C, Khouja JN, et al. Investigating the DNa methylation profile of e-cigarette use. Clinical epigenetics. 2021;13(1):183. doi:10.1186/s13148-021-01174-7
