ACSH slams Vape Research
The American Council on Science and Health casts a disapproving eye over a couple of recent vape studies.
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by Dave Cross
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“E-cigarettes ARE a gateway to smoking: Experts say high usage leads teenagers 'to take up the real thing',” shouts the Daily Mail, in its endless pursuit of clickbait revenue. Ben Spencer, the Mail’s go-to guy for medical stories, is an expert in whipping up a drama out of half-read press releases.
Any half-competent scribe would have no ted that the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine haven’t produced anything new when they state: “teenagers who use e-cigarettes are more likely to go on to smoke tobacco”. It’s a clear twisting of data to produce a distorted but headline-grabbing conclusion.
It is similar to the story we ran last week, where members of the American Academy of Paediatrics (AAP) “proved” a gateway effect. “A logistic regression model was used,” the lead researcher said, “to assess whether flavoured e-cigarette use was associated with intention to initiate cigarette use among never-smoking youth, intention to quit tobacco use among current-smoking youth, and perception of tobacco’s danger among all respondents.”
Surprisingly, the AAP employees discovered a link between flavours and a take-up of smoking. Well, they think so. ACSH’s Hank Campbell begs to differ: “There is just one problem - there is no data showing that.”
Hank slams the catalogue of basic and avoidable errors they made: “It uses p values as a crutch to claim that not only do e-cigarettes not lower smoking, they cause it, and young people who had used e-cigarettes were less likely to view all tobacco as equally harmful. The problems are obvious to those with any experience in statistics; the paper suffers from recall bias, sampling bias, and drawing causal conclusions from a cross-sectional survey. One of those confounders would be troubling yet the paper contains all of them.”
It’s not like any investigation is perfect. ACSH also point out that the recent findings of another study supporting vape as a harm reduction tool could do with tweaking. Vaping advocates rejoiced when researchers announced that bacteria exposed to vape did not exhibit DNA mutation.
“The study was done on two bacterial strains,” write ACSH, “rather than the full battery of five strains recommended by regulatory guidelines. Using the complete panel may have increased sensitivity to mutagenic activity.”
But the difference couldn’t be more stark: while the DNA study has areas that could be improved, the gateway study is a model of ineptitude and/or corruption. The scientific method is not something to be played fast and loose with; advocates, vapers and the research community are watching.
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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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