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No, according to public health researchers from the University at Buffalo and the University of Michigan writing in the journal  Drug and Alcohol Dependence . "The national trends in vaping and cigarette smoking do not support the argument that vaping is leading to smoking," said Lynn Kozlowski, the paper's lead author and a professor of community health and health behavior in UB's School of Public Health and Health Professions. Kozlowski, PhD, added that research in the U.S. shows that as use of e-cigarettes -- the act of which is known as vaping -- has increased, overall smoking rates have decreased. Kozlowski's co-author is Kenneth Warner, the Avedis Donabedian Distinguished University Professor of Public Health in Michigan's School of Public Health. Both Kozlowski and Warner are also former deans of their respective public health schools. "Our analysis focused on the risks for moving from e-cigarettes to cigarettes. There is little evidence ...

To narrow in on these alterations, first author Dr. Gabor Egervari and colleagues studied postmortem human tissue -- a challenging but critical endeavor for understanding the molecular organization of the human brain -- from 48 heroin users and 37 controls. They focused on the striatum, a brain region implicated in drug addiction because of its central role in habit formation and goal-directed behavior. The acetylation changes were observed at genes that mediate glutamatergic function, specifically the glutamate receptor gene GRIA1, which has previously been implicated in drug use. The epigenetic impairments reflect changes that increase accessibility of chromatin, a process that enhances gene transcription, suggesting the impairments play an important role in addiction behavior. "At this time, when prescription opioid use and opioid overdoses are both major threats to our public health, it is important to identify new treatment targets, such as epigenetic processes, that he...