EL PASO, Texas (Aug. 26, 2026) – Nicotine vaping during adolescence may leave a lasting imprint on the brain's reward system, driving nicotine-seeking behavior well into adulthood even after long stretches without any exposure, according to new research led by scientists at The University of Texas at El Paso.
The findings, published in the journal Psychopharmacology, come from a study by a UTEP team working across the School of Pharmacy and the Department of Psychology in the College of Liberal Arts.
Using an animal model of e-cigarette use, the researchers tracked reward-seeking behavior from adolescence through late adulthood.
The most striking result came in the study's final phase, the team said, which was conducted in late adulthood. Following a lengthy period of abstinence, subjects exposed to nicotine vapor early in life sought out nicotine significantly more often than those never exposed. The behavior persisted despite the long gap, pointing to durable changes in how the brain responds to nicotine.
"What we found is that the effects of early nicotine vapor exposure don't simply fade with time," said Ian Mendez, Ph.D., associate professor of pharmacy at UTEP, chair of the pharmaceutical sciences department and the study's corresponding author. "Even after an extended period with no nicotine whatsoever, that early exposure was still shaping behavior later in life. That matters enormously for the millions of young people who began vaping as teenagers and are now carrying the habit into adulthood."
A second experiment examined whether nicotine vapor itself would motivate sustained, effortful work. When each delivery required escalating effort, nicotine drove only modest responding. When the effort required was low, subjects clearly favored a port delivering nicotine. The pattern is consistent with earlier findings that nicotine is a comparatively subtle reinforcer, and it illustrates how challenging vaping behavior can be to capture in a pre-clinical model.
The work lands at a moment of sustained concern about youth vaping. E-cigarettes remain the most commonly used nicotine product among American adolescents, according to data from the FDA National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS). Nicotine use is the leading preventable cause of disease, death and disability in the United States, yet the cumulative health effects of vaping that begin in the teenage years and continue into adulthood remain poorly understood, the researchers noted.
"Our faculty and students are confronting a public health crisis that reaches into many households," said José O. Rivera, Pharm.D., founding dean and professor at UTEP's School of Pharmacy. "And they are doing it with the rigor and creativity that define this University."
The authors note that the study examined only male subjects and call for future work that includes female subjects, citing well-documented sex differences in the mechanisms driving nicotine use disorder. They also recommend that subsequent studies test how the unique additives and metabolites in e-liquids – the materials that are heated and converted into inhalable aerosol by electronic cigarettes and vaping devices – affect the brain and behavior.
The study was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.
About The University of Texas at El Paso
The University of Texas at El Paso is America's leading Hispanic-serving university. Located at the westernmost tip of Texas, where three states and two countries converge along the Rio Grande, 84% of our 26,000 students are Hispanic, and more than half are the first in their families to go to college. With respect to research, UTEP is in the top 5% of universities in America and offers 169 bachelor's, master's and doctoral degree programs at the only open-access, top-tier research university in America.
