Efficacy Study Success
A new study shows that daily e-cigarette use and use of e-cigarettes in 2019 to 2021 were consistently associated with greater cigarette discontinuation rates
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by Dave Cross
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A new study shows that daily e-cigarette use and use of e-cigarettes in 2019 to 2021 were consistently associated with greater cigarette discontinuation rates. “E-Cigarette Characteristics and Cigarette Cessation Among Adults Who Use E-Cigarettes” was published by JAMA Network Open, a monthly open access medical journal published by the American Medical Association.
The work was conducted by a team from Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in New York, the University of Waterloo in Ontario, the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, and the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.
In “E-Cigarette Characteristics and Cigarette Cessation Among Adults Who Use E-Cigarettes”, Kasza, Rivard, Goniewicz, Fong, Hammond, Cummings, and Hyland considered the population-level health outcomes which appear to be associated with vaping, by virtue of vapes helping with the cessation of tobacco use.
They note that the US Food and Drug Administration “has authority to regulate e-cigarette characteristics, including flavour and device type.” This dictates how successful (or not) vaping is at combatting tobacco related disease and death by helping smokers to quit.
The team set out to investigate whether the characteristics of vapes are linked to smoking cessation behaviour with adults in the US population who use vape products.
Using the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health Study (PATH Study) longitudinal data set obtained between 2014 to 2021, “participants were sampled from the civilian noninstitutionalised population using a 4-staged, stratified sampling design. Data were weighted and analysed from 1985 adults ages 21 or older who smoked cigarettes daily and had used e-cigarettes in the past 30 days. Data were analysed in May 2021 to May 2024.”
The team looked at vape product characteristics including:
- use frequency (daily and nondaily)
- flavour type (tobacco, menthol or mint, sweet, and combination)
- device type (disposable, cartridge, and tank)
- year of data collection as a proxy for the evolving e-cigarette marketplace
They measured the following types of smoking cessation behaviour:
- making a tobacco quit attempt
- whether smoking ceased among individuals who made a quit attempt
- overall cigarette discontinuation regardless of quit attempts
The researchers then looked to see if there were links between the characteristics of the vapes being used and what was the outcome of any quit smoking attempt.
The team concluded at the end of the study: “In this study, daily e-cigarette use and use of e-cigarettes in 2019 to 2021 were consistently associated with greater cigarette discontinuation rates. These findings suggest that research focused on e-cigarettes marketed in recent years is needed to inform product regulation and public health policy decisions.”
One more tick in the ‘vaping works to help smokers quit’ column, one more in the eye for those anti-vaping activists who say it doesn’t.
References:
- E-Cigarette Characteristics and Cigarette Cessation Among Adults Who Use E-Cigarettes - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39088219/
Photo Credit:
Photo by John Caroro on Unsplash, resized and cropped
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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