WV News
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — A new study from West Virginia University suggests that rural e-cigarette users are older, and often get sicker, than their urban counterparts.
Researchers with the WVU School of Medicine are investigating severe lung injuries occurring among e-cigarette users in rural Appalachia.
Sunil Sharma, section chief of pulmonary/critical care and sleep medicine at the School of Medicine — and his colleagues presented a case study of patients with EVALI (electronic cigarettes and vaping-associated lung injury) admitted to WVU hospitals from August 2019 to March 2020.
The study, published in “Hospital Practice,” suggests that EVALI in rural Appalachia results in severe respiratory failure.
“Ours is the first rural study,” Sharma said in a release. “One of the real lessons we learned is we can’t take data from urban centers and apply them to rural. We could be different, and we physicians need to treat the way that the science is showing in our areas.” …
