Landmark Study Fails To Find Gateway
A Landmark study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute has failed to identify evidence supporting a gateway effect
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by Dave Cross
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Researchers from the Food and Drug Administration, Roswell Park Cancer Centre, National Institutes for Health, the Truth Initiative, and the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health combined to produce the study.
In “Longitudinal e-cigarette and cigarette use among US youth in the PATH Study”, the team lays out its bias at the outset: “Evidence is accumulating that youth who try ENDS (e-cigarettes) may go on to try cigarettes.”
The group looked at data obtained from almost 12,000 youths and used regression models to identify a gateway effect. They concluded: “Ever ENDS [Electronic nicotine delivery systems] use predicts future cigarette smoking and frequency of ENDS use has a differential impact on subsequent cigarette smoking uptake or reduction. These results suggest that both cigarettes and ENDS should be targeted in early tobacco prevention efforts with youth.”
Dr Michael Siegel is a Professor at the Boston University School of Public Health. He has worked in the field of tobacco control and harm reduction for over thirty years and is widely respected as being an expert in the area. He was quick to respond to the paper’s claimed findings.
“Buried deep within the article is the rather startling, but most critically relevant finding of the entire study,” he said. “The investigators were unable to report a single youth out of the 12,000 in the sample who was a cigarette naive, regular vaper at baseline who progressed to become a smoker at follow-up. Why? Because the number of these youth was so small that it was impossible to accurately quantify this number.”
Siegel has performed his own analysis of the data and pulled up that there were only 21 non-smoking teen vapers who progressed to smoking. On top of that, he noted that this tiny group were exceptionally casual users of vape equipment.
“They literally could have tried an e-cigarette once 30 days earlier. It is possible that vaping was not a gateway to smoking for any of these 21 youth, but even if it was, they represent just 0.2% of the youth population,” he added.
“The bottom line is that despite the widespread claims that vaping is a gateway to smoking initiation among youth, the most definitive study to date of this issue fails to provide any evidence to support that contention. If anything, it provides evidence suggesting that vaping acts as a kind of diversion that can keep some youth away from cigarette smoking.”
Resources:
- “Longitudinal e-cigarette and cigarette use among US youth in the PATH Study (2013-2015)” by Stanton et al - https://academic.oup.com/jnci/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jnci/djz006/5300228
- Dr Michael Siegel’s website - https://tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.com
- US Perceptions of Vaping - https://www.planetofthevapes.co.uk/news/vaping-news/2017-03-16_us-perceptions-of-vaping-study-debunks-gateway.html
- Gateway Study Fail - https://www.planetofthevapes.co.uk/news/vaping-news/2018-06-04_gateway-study-fail.html
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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