Nicotine also causes cancer.
Singapore: Nicotine is one of the chemicals found in cigarette smoke. It is such a powerful carcinogen that nicotine-infused products designed to help people give up smoking may not be safe, the findings showed. It has, until now, only been considered addictive.
Nicotine exposure causes thousands of mutations in a cell's DNA and this could be a precursor to cancer.
"These results are important," said Harold Garner from Virginia Bioinformatics Institute in the US.
"This is because for the first time they directly measured large numbers of genetic variations caused only by nicotine, showing that nicotine by itself can mutate the genome and initiate cancer," Garner added.
