Ecig Gateway Study Slammed
New study claiming to prove a gateway link to smoking slated for providing “no evidence”.
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by Dave Cross
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The study focussed on 146 ever vaped/never smoked teens and 152 never smoked/vaped teens aged 16-18. They looked at ecig use at two points separated by sixteen months. The report notes that smoking had taken place with “40.4% of e-cigarette users (n = 59) and 10.5% of never users (n = 16).”
The study team announced their conclusion: “E-cigarette use in never-smoking youth may increase risk of subsequent initiation of cigarettes and other combustible products during the transition to adulthood when the purchase of tobacco products becomes legal. Stronger associations in participants with no intention of smoking suggests that e-cigarette use was not simply a marker for individuals who would have gone on to smoke regardless of e-cigarette use.”
They claim: “Those who reported e-cigarette use had [more than] 6 times the odds of initiating cigarette use as never e-cigarette users.” Moreover, they claim that ecigs play an even larger part in smoking take up intentions within non-ecig/cigarette users.
The researchers have presented data charts and graphs to support their position and findings. In fact they’ve tried to do everything they can to bend reality their study could feature in a future sci-fi film. “This study is virtually meaningless in terms of its evaluation of the ‘gateway’ hypothesis,” commented Dr Siegel. “Baseline e-cigarette use was defined as ever having taken even one puff of an e-cigarette. And smoking initiation was similarly defined as ever having taken even one puff of a cigarette. So the study did not document that even one subject in the study was ever a regular vaper.”
Like the flawed studies that have gone before it, this one is littered with unanswered questions. To cast your conclusions from a survey looking at someone who has only take one puff of an ecig or cigarette lacks any longitudinal validity. A person who has taken a single drag of a traditional tobacco cigarette is not “a smoker”, no matter how you may wish to define it.
Siegel continues: “The key point is that the e-cigarette group consisted of youth who had ever puffed on an e-cigarette, not youth who reported being regular vapers. In order for the gateway hypothesis to be true, kids would have to become regular vapers – addicted to nicotine – and then move on to smoking. The paper provides no evidence that this is the case.”
So, another swing and a miss for the anti-vaping lobby even if we will see this study cited in future papers.
Dave Cross
Journalist at POTVDave is a freelance writer; with articles on music, motorbikes, football, pop-science, vaping and tobacco harm reduction in Sounds, Melody Maker, UBG, AWoL, Bike, When Saturday Comes, Vape News Magazine, and syndicated across the Johnston Press group. He was published in an anthology of “Greatest Football Writing”, but still believes this was a mistake. Dave contributes sketches to comedy shows and used to co-host a radio sketch show. He’s worked with numerous start-ups to develop content for their websites.
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