GLADEWATER, TX (KLTV) One East Texas woman said she became terribly ill the reason? She said it was e cigarettes.

The Gladewater woman is determined to spread the word, claiming that after switching from regular cigarettes to electronic cigarettes, she fell ill. She said that she had hoped the new product would be safer, and ultimately help her quit smoking, but she never expected what happened next.

It was three weeks ago that Debbie Jean Hendrix had an eye opening talk with her husband.

“I told him, I said, ‘I don’t want to live like that,'” Hendrix said. “And he said, ‘Well, you better quit smoking.” Well, that’s when we started the e cigarettes,” she explained.

Debbie said she saw an elderly woman who required an oxygen tank because of smoking. But, just days after switching to e cigarettes, Debbie said she began to wonder about the product’s safety.

“I started feeling really kind of jittery,” Hendrix said. “And once I started feeling real jittery me and my husband went to town to eat and I got so sick I couldn’t keep anything down,” she remembered.

That’s when Debbie said she went to her doctor.

“He thought I was on drugs when I went in there. That’s how bad it was,” she said.

Debbie said she does have pre existing health issues, but she said, her doctor insisted she quit the e cigarettes.

“He would definitely say that the vapor cigarettes needed to go because they had chemical in them and he said it could be the cause from the chemical,” Hendrix said.

“From what I understand, the poisoning could take place through one of three venues,” Dr. Bill Sorensen, a health science expert, explained.

Nicotine poisoning can happen by inhalation, ingestion, or skin absorption.

Debbie did notice when changing the liquid on her electronic cigarette that it often leaked, causing liquid nicotine to spill onto her hands.

“You should be feeling those symptoms within minutes, maybe a few hours after the experience with the e cigarette,” Dr. Sorensen explained.

And that’s exactly what Debbie said happened to her.

“People might be thinking that it’s safer and because it’s safer I m allowed to smoke twice as much,” Dr. Sorensen said.

Though other chemicals may be gone, he said, nicotine is ever present.

It is toxic. It’s addictive. And even if you’re not poisoned by it, or even if you don’t become a little sick, you’re on the road to addiction.”

As for Debbie, she has stopped using e cigarettes.

“I do feel a little better now that I have got off of them and I wouldn’t recommend them to no one,” Debbie said.

She also said she’ll be quitting smoking completely.

The Centers for Disease Control published a report this month stating calls to poison control centers about e cigarettes have shot up from about one per month in September 2010, to approximately 215 per month in February 2014.

Many of those calls involved children, but the CDC did attribute them to e cigarettes related overdoses.

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E-cigarettes: gateway to nicotine addiction for u.s. teens, says ucsf study

How to order cigarettes, pall mall cigarettes online, where c… on twitpic

Contrary to advertiser claims that e cigarettes can help consumers stop smoking conventional cigarettes, teenagers who used e cigarettes and conventional cigarettes were much less likely to have abstained from cigarettes in the past 30 days, 6 months, or year. At the same time, they were more likely to be planning to quit smoking in the next year than smokers who did not use e cigarettes.

The study s cross sectional nature didn t allow the researchers to identify whether most youths initiated with conventional cigarettes or e cigarettes. But the authors noted that about 20 percent of middle school students and about 7 percent of high school students who had ever used e cigarettes had never smoked regular cigarettes meaning that some kids are introduced to the addictive drug nicotine through e cigarettes, the authors said.

It looks to me like the wild west marketing of e cigarettes is not only encouraging youth to smoke them, but also it is promoting regular cigarette smoking among youth, said senior author Stanton A. Glantz, PhD, UCSF professor of medicine and director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education.

Study of E Cigarette Use Progresses

The new results are consistent with a similar study of 75,000 Korean adolescents published last year by UCSF researchers, which also found that adolescents who used e cigarettes were less likely to have stopped smoking conventional cigarettes.

In combination, the two studies suggest that e cigarettes may contribute to nicotine addiction and are unlikely to discourage conventional cigarette smoking among youths, said the scientists.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last year that the majority of adolescents who have ever smoked e cigarettes also have smoked regular cigarettes. An estimated 1.78 million U.S. students have used the devices as of 2012, the CDC reported.

The research was funded by the National Cancer Institute (grants CA 113710 and CA 060121).

The Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education specializes in tobacco control research focused on policy change, smoking cessation, nicotine addiction, health disparities in smoking, novel tobacco devices and tobacco marketing. It also houses the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, a rich resource of previously confidential tobacco industry documents.

UCSF is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. It includes top ranked graduate schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy, a graduate division with nationally renowned programs in basic biomedical, translational and population sciences, as well as a preeminent biomedical research enterprise and two top ranked hospitals, UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children s Hospital.