Your trusted source

With their minty flavour, menthol cigarettes are considered by many to taste more mellow than regular tobacco.

But they are just as unhealthy and might lead to more severe lung problems, a new study has warned, the Daily Mail reports.

Smokers who reported using menthol cigarettes had more trips to accident and emergency rooms than smokers of regular cigarettes.

They were also hospitalised for treatment for severe worsening of their lung disease more regularly than people smoking unflavoured tobacco, the study found.

These worsenings, or 'exacerbations', might include difficulty breathing or a major increase in phlegm that lasts for days.

Researchers think menthol might have an anaesthetic effect on the airways, making it more difficult to identify if their smokers' lung disease is getting worse.

'We were surprised that menthol smokers, compared to non-menthol cigarette smokers, reported more severe exacerbations and had a greater odds of experiencing severe exacerbations,' said Dr. Marilyn Foreman, of the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, U.S..

The news comes after Canadian researchers found young people who smoke menthol cigarettes smoke almost double the amount of tobacco.

Published in June, the study found menthol users smoked an average of 43 cigarettes a week, close to double the 26 smoked by non-menthol users.

Menthol smokers were also almost three times more likely to say that they intend to continue smoking in the next year.

As part of the new study, Dr Foreman and her colleagues compared 3,758 menthol smokers and 1,941 regular smokers, aged 45 to 80, who smoked at least 10 packs of cigarettes per year.

The menthol smokers were slightly younger and more likely to be female and black, they found.

At first glance, it seemed that the menthol smokers had less chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and they were less likely to have chronic cough or chronic sputum production – mucus coughed up from the lower airways.

They were also less likely to use medications to help them breathe.

Overall, the two groups had similar frequencies of COPD exacerbations during the average 18-month period of the study.

But the menthol smokers had more frequent severe exacerbations: 0.22 per year, versus 0.18 per year among smokers of regular tobacco cigarettes.

The menthol smokers also did worse on a test of how far they could walk in six minutes, and they were more short of breath than people who smoked regular cigarettes.

When the researchers took other factors into account, such as age and other diseases, there were no longer any differences between the menthol and regular tobacco smokers in lung function, exercise capacity, or breathing problems.

There was still, however, a 29 per cent higher risk of severe lung disease exacerbations with use of menthol cigarettes.

The researchers think menthol might have an anaesthetic effect on the airways, and as a result, it might take longer to recognize that smokers' lung disease is worsening, said Dr Foreman.

She and her colleagues admit, though, that their study can't prove menthol is responsible for making smokers' lung problems worse.

Other experts, who weren't involved in the study, have questioned the results.

'In general in the article, the people who smoked menthol cigarettes were different, younger, more likely to be African-American and female,' Dr. Sean Forsythe, of Loyola University Medical Center, U.S., said.

'So maybe the differences weren't due to menthol but were due to the fact that the patients were different,' he added.