Glo, a tobacco-heating product, has significantly less impact on

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Glo, a tobacco-heating product, has significantly less impact on
News release

11 March 2017

New research indicates that glo, a commercial tobacco heating product (THP), has less of an impact on indoor air quality than cigarette smoke.

THPs heat rather than burn tobacco and so they have the potential to reduce the number and levels of toxicants in emissions. The enclosed design of THPs and lower operating temperatures mean they do not produce emissions between puffs.

Scientists at British American Tobacco analysed the indoor air quality of an environmentally controlled room containing four study subjects using THPs at fixed intervals over four hours. Air from the room was sampled and analysed for known tobacco smoke markers referenced below. The results were compared with those from an air control room and a room containing the same four volunteers but smoking cigarettes.

The air was analysed for the 9 types of harmful components which the World Health Organisation recommends to reduce. Of these, in the room in which the THPs were used, seven toxicants were either not detected at all or present at the same levels as in the control room, where nobody used any product at all. The remaining two toxicants (formaldehyde and acetaldehyde) were present at significantly reduced levels compared to the room in which cigarettes were smoked. Fewer traces of nicotine were detected in the THP room, compared to amounts found in the cigarette room. [The concentration of particles in the THP room was also reduced (and closer to air control) compared to the concentration found in the cigarette room.]

‘These data show reduced toxicant emissions compared to cigarette smoke which indicates that glo has the potential to considerably reduce exposure to toxicants relative to cigarette smoke,’ says Dr Chuan Liu, Head of Discovery, THP Science at British American Tobacco.

The results are presented today at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco in Florence, Italy.

Dr Chuan Liu’s poster from the SRNT can now be viewed in the bat-science library

Figure 1: Changes in room aerosol mass concentration when using glo Tobacco Heating Product (green) versus cigarette smoke (brown) and air controls (blue). Even under extreme use conditions (20 cigarettes or THP used in 10 groups of 2 rods and low room ventilation) the levels of 9 toxicants detected from THP use remain much closer to the air control background and are significantly less in comparison to the levels of those toxicants detected from cigarette smoking.

Figure 2: Changes in room aerosol number concentration when using glo Tobacco Heating Product (green) versus cigarette smoke (brown) and air controls (blue). Even under extreme use conditions (20 cigarettes or THP used in 10 groups of 2 rods and low room ventilation) the levels of 9 toxicants detected from THP use remains much closer to the air control background and are significantly less in comparison to the levels of those toxicants detected from smoking cigarettes.

NOTES TO EDITORS

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