Aerosol emissions from Heated Tobacco Products: a review focusing on carbonyls, analytical methods and experimental quality

We provide an extensive review of 17 independent industry-funded studies targeting carbonyls in aerosol emissions of Heated Tobacco Products (HTPs), focusing on quality criteria based on the reproducibility of experiments, appropriate analytic methods, and puffing regimes. Most revised studies complied with these requirements, but some were unreproducible, and others failed to consider analytical variables that may have affected the results and/or produced unrealistic comparisons. We also provide a review of the literature on physicochemical properties of heated tobacco and HTP aerosols, as well as the evaluation of HTPs by regulatory agencies and address various critiques of their relative safety profile. The outcomes from the revised studies and regu-latory evaluations tend to agree with and converge to a general consensus that HTP aerosols ex-pose users to significantly lower levels of toxicity than tobacco smoke.