French Study Can’t Find A Gateway
A French study has found no evidence for a teen gateway – and concludes that the use of ecigs is helping prevent teens from taking up tobacco
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by Dave Cross
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They write: “E-cigarette use, especially among adolescents, remains a controversial topic in public health. The first problem is the intrinsic danger of vaping. Vaping is predominantly considered to be safer than conventional cigarette smoking, although there is currently insufficient evidence for disregarding any long-term toxicity.
“The second problem is the potential relationship between e-cigarettes and tobacco: could e-cigarettes increase the risk of a transition to tobacco smoking, or could they reduce smoking prevalence by serving as a substitution product?
“A third problem is the potential risk that the marketing and growing popularity of vaping products could eventually ‘renormalize’ smoking, and thus undermine the current declining trends in tobacco use among young people. Providing answers to these questions is of considerable importance for public health, as it could help in prevention campaigns targeting adolescents.”
They looked at data from 24111 French adolescents aged 17-18.5 years. All these individuals self-reported previously experimenting with either e‐cigarettes or tobacco.
The team concluded: “Overall, experimenting with e-cigarette first (as opposed to tobacco first) was associated with a reduction in the risk of daily tobacco smoking by the age of 17-18. The association varied with age at experimentation, and an early age of experimentation actually increased the risk. National specificities as to the stage in the tobacco/e-cigarette epidemic and their regulation could play a role in the fact that many adolescents experimenting first with e-cigarette never became tobacco experimenters and that the association with daily smoking was negative even among tobacco experimenters.”
The study mirrors findings from France in 2019 [link], where the authors concluded: “Our results found no evidence of an increased risk of transitioning to daily smoking at 17 among ever-smokers who also experimented with e-cigarettes. Further studies should investigate the longer-term role of vaping on future smoking habits with the use of causal inference methods.”
Related:
- “Experimenting first with e‐cigarettes versus first with cigarettes and transition to daily cigarette use among adolescents: the crucial effect of age at first experiment”, Legleye et al. – [link]
Photo Credit:
Photo by Florian Wehde on Unsplash
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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