A 22-year-old man, who was given a one percent change of surviving after developing a vaping addiction, has shared some urgent words of warning.
Jackson Allard, from North Dakota, was given a bleak outlook until a double lung transplant saved his life. He was initially rushed into hospital last October, complaining of stomach pain but doctors struggled to find a diagnosis and his symptoms were eventually put down to having Influenza 4 and double pneumonia.
After being rushed to University of Minnesota Medical Center to undergo a double lung transplant at the beginning of the year, it was thought that his eight year vaping addiction had led to the rapid and serious deterioration in his health.
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The transplant wasn't the way out of the woods for Jackson either, as he's spent the first three months of this year fighting for his life and was fully intubated and put on life support, with his heart even stopping at one point.
Yet his last words to his family before being put under were: "I am scared, I don’t want to be alone."
The 22-year-old also revealed how his addiction started young as he explained: "When I first started vaping, I was probably 14. I was pretty much non-stop doing it. I told my friend who smokes weed, I was like, 'Be careful with that'."
Allard's grandmother, Doreen Hurlburt, also shared a stark warning as she explained: "At one point a doctor said he had a one percent chance of living and we said, ‘He’s fighting, he’s fought for how many weeks we’re going to give him a chance to fight, we’re not going to stop any procedures or anything’."
She added: "Multiple doctors said, 'If you smoke cigarettes for 50 years, we'll see you with lung cancer, and if you vape for five years, we'll see you with permanent lung damage'."
Dr. Stephanie Hanson at Stanford explained: “Vaping or e-cigarette use is relatively new, so we don’t necessarily know a lot of the long-term effects of vaping and that’s honestly one of the scariest things about it.”
Researchers from the University of Texas looked at the health data from more than 40,000 people of all ages over the course of five years.
At the start of the 2022 analysis, none of the participants had asthma but by the end of the study, they found that roughly ten in every 1,000 adults had developed the common respiratory condition as a side effect of vaping. Those who had used e-cigarettes in the 30 days prior to the final analysis had a 252 percent higher risk of developing asthma early in life, before age 27, compared to those who did not use e-cigarettes.
Niamh Spence