Reluctant Quitters
The Office of Health Improvement and Disparities’ Martin Dockrell is reminding doctors and nurses that vaping helps smokers to quit even if they don’t want to stop smoking
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by Dave Cross
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Martin Dockrell, the Tobacco Control Programme Lead for The Office of Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID), previously Public Health England, is reminding doctors and nurses that vaping helps smokers to quit even if they don’t want to stop smoking. He is encouraging them to read a paper on the subject published by JAMA Network Open.
Martin Dockrell joined Public Health England after 7 years working at Action on Smoking and Health. He has worked in public health since the mid 1980’s when he was involved in HIV prevention work and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Public Health.
He said: “So, Doctors and Nurses, you have that middle-aged smoker in your clinic again. He's not that well educated and he has zero intention to quit. What do you do?
“Clue: He is 10 times more likely to quit if he starts vaping every day. Vaping less than daily makes no difference.”
Martin pointed medical staff to “Association of e-Cigarette Use With Discontinuation of Cigarette Smoking Among Adult Smokers Who Were Initially Never Planning to Quit”.
The authors of the paper worked for various North American institutions:
- Department of Health Behaviour, Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, Buffalo, New York.
- Westat Inc, Rockville, Maryland.
- National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.
- Centre for Tobacco Products Food and Drug Administration, Silver Spring, Maryland.
- Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston.
- New York University, New York.
- Kelly Government Solutions, Rockville, Maryland.
- Masonic Cancer Centre, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
In the paper, the authors detail that “cigarette smokers not planning to quit are often overlooked in population studies evaluating the risk-benefit potential of electronic nicotine delivery products (e-cigarettes).”
The team set out to evaluate whether vaping is associated with quitting smoking in smokers who were not planning on quitting. They used data from the longitudinal Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health Study (PATH Study) and evaluated participants over 3 pairs of interviews.
The main outcomes they measured “were discontinuation of cigarette smoking (i.e., no cigarette smoking) and discontinuation of daily cigarette smoking (i.e., no daily cigarette smoking) at follow-up interview. Generalised estimating equations were used to evaluate the association between the exposure and each outcome, controlling for demographic characteristics and cigarettes smoked per day at baseline interview; all estimates were weighted.”
“In this cohort study, daily e-cigarette use was associated with greater odds of cigarette discontinuation among smokers who initially had no plans to ever quit smoking.”
The research team concluded: “In this cohort study, daily e-cigarette use was associated with greater odds of cigarette discontinuation among smokers who initially had no plans to ever quit smoking. These findings support the consideration of smokers who are not planning to quit when evaluating the risk-benefit potential of e-cigarettes for smoking cessation in the population.”
Photo Credit:
Photo by Ahmed Zayan 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.
