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 BENTONVILLE, Ark. (KNWA) -- They're advertised as a safer alternative to smoking cigarettes, but one Northwest Arkansas man has a warning to electronic cigarette users after his exploded in his mouth. 
 
 
 
 Josh Swartz is stitched up, but out of work as he fights through the pain of healing. He says he bought his e-cigarette just two weeks ago in hopes it would help him quit smoking. 
 
 
 
 Josh says he bought a Fu Chai Mechanical Mod. "I put it to my mouth and as soon as I pressed the button on the bottom, the device exploded," Josh said. 
 
 
 
 Struggling to speak, Josh slowly explained what he says happened on Friday night. 
 
 
 
 "As soon as it exploded, I just had this intense pain and burning inside my mouth and my throat," he said. 
 
 
 
 His wife, Cindy, says she was headed to the garage to meet Josh when she heard what sounded like a gunshot and saw flames shooting from the garage. 
 
 
 
 "That's when I looked back and I found my husband bent over here in the garage and gasping for air and he couldn't even speak to me," Cindy said. 
 
 
 
 Josh suffered burns to his mouth, throat and hand, shattered teeth, and severed lips. 
 
 
 
 "It was hanging down, and this entire piece here had to be put back into place. Then there's a hole through my lip here," he explained. 
 
 
 
 The couple believes the battery is to blame. Cindy showed how the electronic cigarette broke into pieces during the explosion, turning the battery almost inside out. 
 
 
 
 They say they were never warned of possible dangers, but they hope to help change that. 
 
 
 
 "We're all just guinea pigs. Until we speak up and try to share with other people that these are dangerous and they can happen to you, then people aren't going to know," Cindy said. 
 
 
 
 The couple is meeting with a lawyer this week in hopes of recouping medical costs. They also hope this incident will lead to more regulations, including warning signs inside shops. ||||| Banning the sale of e-cigarettes to minors has the counterintuitive effect of increasing rates of conventional smoking among this vulnerable age group, the results of an analysis of states with and without bans reveal. 
 
 Abigail Sarah Friedman, PhD, assistant professor of public health, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut, and colleagues found that banning e-cigarette sales to people younger than 18 years increased smoking rates by 0.9% among 12- to 17-year-olds. 
 
 "Conventional cigarette use has been falling somewhat steadily among this age group since the start of the 21st century. This paper shows that bans on e-cigarette sales to minors appear to have slowed this decline by about 70% in the states that implemented them," Dr Friedman said in a release. 
 
 "In other words, as a result of these bans, more teenagers are using conventional cigarettes than otherwise would have done so. Policy makers have been assuming that banning e-cigarette sales to minors will improve public health," she added. 
 
 "This paper's finding, that these bans increase conventional cigarette smoking among teens, suggests that we may need to rethink this conclusion." 
 
 The research was published online October 19 in the Journal of Health Economics. 
 
 Sanctioning Teen Vaping? 
 
 To determine the impact of banning e-cigarettes on teen smoking rates, the team chose January 1, 2014, as a cutoff date, because 24 states had banned the sale of cigarettes to minors by then. 
 
 Using 2-year average smoking rates from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the researchers found that between 2002/3 and 2012/13, recent (within 30 days) smoking fell from 13.5% to 6.7% among 12- to 17-year-olds and from 42.1% to 32.8% among people aged 18 to 25 years. 
 
 Analysis of recent smoking indicated that there were no significant differences in smoking rates among 12- to 17-year-olds in states that would and would not go on to ban e-cigarette sales to minors. 
 
 This observation held after controlling for state demographics, state cigarette tax rates, and indicators for smoke-free air laws and medical marijuana legalization, as well as for smoking rates among 18- to 25-year-olds. 
 
 However, regressions comparing states with and without bans on e-cigarette sales to minors revealed that states that introduced bans experienced a subsequent positive and significant 0.7% rise in recent smoking among 12- to 17-year-olds. 
 
 Increasing the period of interest to 2 years to take into account the time when the bans were introduced led to even larger effects, at a relative 0.9% increase in smoking rates in states with e-cigarette bans. 
 
 The team calculates that this countered 70% of the decline in smoking that would have been expected during the same period had the ban not been introduced. 
 
 The findings, coupled with the assumption that e-cigarettes are less risky to health than traditional cigarettes, raises a question concerning the wisdom of banning e-cigarette sales to minors, the researchers write. 
 
 However, they note that this does not represent a "straightforward guide to regulation." 
 
 "Beyond the fact that the market had not reached equilibrium by 2013, an FDA decision not to ban e-cigarette sales to minors after having announced this intention could be seen as sanctioning teen vaping, introducing distinct costs not addressed here," the investigators note. 
 
 "A middle ground that recognizes the potential for yet unknown long run costs of e-cigarette use might involve banning sales to those younger than 16 instead of 18, as initiation of regular smoking first spikes at the former age." 
 
 The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study provided fellowship funding in support of this research. The authors have disclosed no relevant financial relationships. 
 
 J Health Econ. Published online October 19, 2015. Abstract ||||| Understanding electronic cigarettes’ effect on tobacco smoking is a central economic and policy issue. This paper examines the causal impact of e-cigarette access on conventional cigarette use by adolescents. Regression analyses consider how state bans on e-cigarette sales to minors influence smoking rates among 12 to 17 year olds. Such bans yield a statistically significant 0.9 percentage point increase in recent smoking in this age group, relative to states without such bans. Results are robust to multiple specifications as well as several falsification and placebo checks. This effect is both consistent with e-cigarette access reducing smoking among minors, and large: banning electronic cigarette sales to minors counteracts 70 percent of the downward pre-trend in teen cigarette smoking for a given two-year period. ||||| Also Meets CME requirements for: 
 
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 Your quiz results: The filled radio buttons indicate your responses. The preferred responses are highlighted ||||| Adolescents who reported using e-cigarettes were about 30 percent more likely to report respiratory symptoms than those who never used e-cigarettes, in a study from China. 
 
 The increased risk of breathing problems - like a cough or phlegm - varied depending on whether or not the adolescents also smoked traditional cigarettes. 
 
 "Among never smoking adolescents, e-cigarette users are twice as likely to report respiratory symptoms than non-users," study author Dr. Daniel Ho, of the University of Hong Kong School of Public Health. 
 
 "E-cigarettes are certainly not harmless and serious health problems of long-term use will probably emerge with time," Ho added in an email to Reuters Health. 
 
 E-cigarettes deliver nicotine through a vapor, which contains propylene glycol and flavoring chemicals known to be bothersome to the respiratory system, the researchers write in JAMA Pediatrics. 
 
 While past research found some short-term respiratory effects in adults after e-cigarette use, the researchers say no study had looked for these effects in adolescents. 
 
 The new findings are drawn from data collected between 2012 and 2013 from over 45,000 schoolchildren in Hong Kong with an average age of about 15. 
 
 Overall, 1.1 percent of students reported smoking e-cigarettes within the past 30 days, and about 19 percent of all students reported respiratory symptoms. 
 
 Students who smoked e-cigarettes were 30 percent more likely to report breathing problems, compared to those who didn't use the devices. 
 
 The difference in breathing problems was most pronounced among students who said they never smoked traditional cigarettes. These students were over twice as likely to report breathing problems as those who didn't use e-cigarettes. 
 
 Students who reported using e-cigarettes and also smoking traditional cigarettes at some point in their lives were at a 40 percent increased risk of breathing problems, compared to those who didn't use the devices. 
 
 While the study can't prove the devices caused breathing problems among children, the researchers say the findings support the World Health Organization's recommendation to regulate e-cigarette use among children. 
 
 "Other studies have also shown that adolescent e-cigarette users are more likely to initiate cigarette smoking than non-users," Ho said. "One in two smokers will be killed by tobacco; two in three if started from a young age." 
 
 Parents, he said, can prevent e-cigarette and traditional cigarette use among their children by not using the devices or tobacco, not exposing their children to secondhand smoke and setting strict smoke-free rules at home. 
 
 "E-cigarette use is a controversial topic," Ho said. "While supporters are optimistic about the potential for harm reduction in the minority of established cigarette smokers, (for) which convincing evidence is lacking, this does not seem to justify the potential harm of re-normalizing cigarette smoking, delaying smoking cessation, and escalating to real cigarette smoking, especially among the majority non-smoking young people." 
 
 SOURCE: bit.ly/1NmYJII JAMA Pediatrics, online November 9, 2015.
– Josh Swartz bought an e-cigarette just two weeks ago, hoping to use it to quit smoking. Instead, on Friday, it exploded while he was smoking it, the Arkansas man tells KNWA. "I put it to my mouth and as soon as I pressed the button on the bottom, the device exploded," he says. His wife, who was on her way to the garage to find her husband at the time, says she heard what sounded like gunfire and saw flames. "That's when I looked back and I found my husband bent over here in the garage and gasping for air and he couldn't even speak to me," she says. In addition to burns on his mouth, throat, and hand, Josh also ended up with severed lips and shattered teeth; they believe the e-cigarette's battery caused the explosion. The tale is just the latest bit of bad publicity for the e-cigarette industry: A study published this week finds that adolescents who use e-cigarettes are 30% more likely than those who've never used the devices to report respiratory problems like coughing or phlegm, Reuters reports. "E-cigarettes are certainly not harmless and serious health problems of long-term use will probably emerge with time," the study author says. But the idea of banning e-cigarette sales to teens is not as good as it may sound: Another recent study finds that when people under 18 are not allowed to purchase e-cigarettes, rates of traditional smoking among that age group actually go up, Medscape reports. (Click to read about another man who was recently injured by an exploding e-cigarette.)