Your health: Hookah smoking among college students increases

Twitter influences hookah use

As hookah smoking becomes more popular among young adults, especially college-age students, researchers are finding that positive mentions about hookah use on Twitter — more than 12,000 a day — may be adding to the misperception that it is somehow less harmful than cigarette smoking, The Washington Post reports.

It's not.

While cigarette smoking has gone down over the past decades, hookah is “definitely something that's becoming more popular, especially among college students,” said Melissa Krauss, a research statistician at Washington University School of Medicine and lead author of a study published recently in Preventing Chronic Disease, a journal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“It's a very social and trendy behavior. There are a lot hookah bars popping up near college campuses,” Krauss said.

Hookahs are water pipes that are used to smoke specially-made tobacco that is usually flavored. Other names are waterpipe, sheesha or shisha.

Hookah smoking typically takes place in groups, with the same mouthpiece passed from person to person.

What people don't realize, researchers said, is that hookah smoke contains many of the same harmful toxins as cigarette smoke and has been associated with lung cancer, respiratory illness, low birth weight and gum disease.

And because of the method of smoking — more puffs, deeper inhalation over longer smoking sessions — hookah smokers may absorb higher concentrations of the same toxins found in cigarette smoke.

The study is the first to rely exclusively on tweets about hookah use. Researchers say they are increasingly turning to social media to study newer trends in substance use because the data is more readily available than results from traditional health surveys.

The researchers have done similar analyses using tweets about alcohol and marijuana. There are more tweets about marijuana (more than 250,000 a day) and alcohol (at least 400,000 a day) than about hookah, but more tweets about hookah than smoking e-cigarettes (1,200 a day).

Researchers collected all tweets containing the terms “hookah” and “shisha” (and alternative spellings) from April to May 2014. Of more than 350,000 such tweets, researchers then analyzed the contents of nearly 40,000 tweets from people they considered the most influential.

From that pool, they analyzed a random sample of about 5,000 tweets. Of those, a majority, or 87 percent, were pro-hookah and included tweets from users and from songs or music. Nearly a quarter were commercial promotions from bars or clubs.

Hookah bars are often exempt from indoor-smoking bans enforced in many states and localities, researchers said.

Marijuana may help heal bones

There's yet another use for marijuana: It may help to heal broken bones, according to a new study, The Washington Post reports.

Researchers found that cannabidiol — an element of marijuana that does not get people high — improved the healing process in rats with broken leg bones after eight weeks, according to a study published in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research by Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University.

Yankel Gabet of Tel Aviv's Bone Research Laboratory who led the study, said it found that the element “makes bones stronger during healing,” which could prevent future fractures.

This process occurs as cannabidiol, or CBD, enhances the maturation of collagen, the protein in connective tissue that “holds the body together.”

“After being treated with CBD, the healed bone will be harder to break in the future,” Gabet said.

The results of the study provide another glimpse into the potential health benefits of marijuana. Medicinal marijuana is already used to reduce some of the effects associated with chemotherapy in cancer patients. It is also used as treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.

In earlier research, Gabet's team learned that the body's cannabinoid receptors “stimulated bone formation and inhibited bone loss.” Those findings open doors to how marijuana could treat osteoporosis and other bone-related diseases, the researchers say.

According to Gabet, “there is still a lot of work to be done to develop appropriate therapies” in using marijuana medically, but “it is possible to detach a clinical therapy objective” from the mood-changing aspects of the stoner's plant.