WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 (Xinhua) -- Vaping can significantly increase a person's risk of developing chronic lung diseases like asthma, bronchitis or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, according to a new study.

Published Monday in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, it is the first panel study linking e-cigarettes to respiratory illness in the U.S. adult population.

The findings are based on publicly available datasets that tracked e-cigarette and tobacco habits as well as new lung disease diagnoses in over 32,000 American adults from 2013 to 2016.

Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), started with people who did not have any reported lung disease and then followed them for three years. The study excluded the possibility that people with lung disease were more likely to use e-cigarettes, offering stronger evidence of a causal link between adult e-cigarette use and lung diseases than prior studies.

They also found that people who used e-cigarettes and also smoked tobacco were at an even higher risk of developing chronic lung disease than those who used either product alone.

E-cigarette users were 1.3 times more likely to develop chronic lung disease, while tobacco smokers increased their risk by a factor of 2.6. For dual users, the two risks multiply, more than tripling the risk of developing lung disease, according to the study.

"Switching from conventional cigarettes to e-cigarettes exclusively could reduce the risk of lung disease, but very few people do it," said Stanton Glantz, a UCSF professor of medicine and the paper's senior author.

"For most smokers, they simply add e-cigarettes and become dual users, significantly increasing their risk of developing lung disease above just smoking," said Glantz.

The findings reported in this study are unrelated to e-cigarette or vaping product use-associated lung injury -- the acute lung disease first reported last summer and prevalent this year in the country.

A total of 2,409 hospitalized vaping-related lung disease cases have been reported in the United States as of Dec. 10, causing 52 deaths, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.