by NGPs,” said Dr James Murphy, Head of Reduced Risk
Substantiation at British American Tobacco. “And here instead
of looking just at whether switching (to products with reduced
emissions) has resulted in a sustained reduction of certain
toxicants in the body, we will also look at whether switching has
impacted things that can be indicative of health - things like heart
rate, blood pressure and cholesterol levels.”
This key study will involve hundreds of consumers, and our
researchers will be looking at biomarkers of exposure and
biomarkers of potential harm like blood pressure and cholesterol
and comparing all groups with quitters. These groups will include
smokers who don’t want to quit; smokers who don’t want to quit
but are willing to switch to alternative products; and smokers
who want to quit and are willing to use more traditional cessation
products such as nicotine-replacement-therapies (NRTs).
“We are very excited about this project. It’s our most ambitious
clinical study to date,” says Murphy. “It involves gathering
information on hundreds of consumers over the period of a year.
We expect that it will take a few years to analyse all the data, data
that we think will go a long way towards helping us understand the
long-term health effects of switching from smoking to alternative
products, like e-cigarettes,” he says.
Public health debate
Public Health authorities in the UK continue to take leadership
in the global debate, in particular on e-cigarettes. In October
last year, Public Health England announced that its annual
government-sponsored stop-smoking campaign, ‘Stoptober’,
would support the use of e-cigarettes for the first time as an
alternative to smoking. The campaign featured e-cigarettes in its
televised adverts, and stated on its website that "[e]-cigarettes are
a great way to help combat nicotine cravings and carry a fraction
of the risk of cigarettes."
However, this category is still relatively new and consumers and
regulators rightly want as much information as possible about
e-cigarettes and other products. We think that clinical studies, like
the one we are about to undertake, will help provide the evidence
required to provide consumers and regulators with the assurances
they need on the risk profile of reduced exposure products.
Clinical Study – British American Tobacco
Objective: to measures changes in health indicators such as
blood pressure or lipids that may indicate beneficial changes
in health in smokers and other nicotine users
Duration: One year
Subject Groups
• Smokers
• Smokers who don’t want to quit but are willing to switch and
randomly selected to use Next Generation Products
• Smokers who want to quit and randomly selected to use
traditional smoking cessation products
• Champix (anti-smoking drug)
• NRTs or • Nothing • Non-smokers
“We have a long heritage of
working in this area, and were
the first to conduct a risk-
spectrum exposure study that
demonstrated the difference
in emissions between smoke
and the vapour produced by
next generation products’ Dr
James Murphy, Head of Reduced
Risk Substantiation, British
American Tobacco.”
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