“E-cigarette use does not appear to be associated with
current, continued smoking.
“Instead, the apparent relationship between e-cigarette
use and current conventional smoking is fully explained
by shared risk factors, thus failing to support claims
that e-cigarettes have a causal effect on concurrent
conventional smoking among youth.”
As tighter regulations are being enforced upon the vaping
industry, such as the flavour ban, this type of evidence
should be considered.
The initiative behind multiple states enacting an e-liquid
flavour ban was due to the belief that vaping is inciting
more teenagers to become addicted to nicotine.
However, this large-scale study proves otherwise.
Selya, an assistant scientist at Sanford Health in South
Dakota, said: “It’s really important to hold off making
policies on e-cigarettes until we have a more solid
understanding of its effects.”
Dr Nicholas Chadi, a specialist in addiction medicine and
assistant professor of paediatrics at the University of
Montreal, underlined the importance of the research.
He said: “Several published studies show a signifi cant
association between e-cigarette use and current and
future smoking [and so] these fi ndings would need to be
replicated.”
He argued that lifestyle factors could be the explanation
behind papers from 2015 and 2016 that contradict this
new evidence.
Dr Chadi explained products with high levels of nicotine
such as JUUL were new to the market and were “just
starting to become popular on a large scale at that time.”
He added: “So, it’s possible that the same study conducted
today would show different results” as e-cigarettes are no
longer a new product and are not rapidly increasing in
usage rates amongst teenagers anymore.
Moving forward, monitoring these same study
participants over a lengthier period of time has the
potential to strengthen this evidence.
This year, Action on Smoking and Health released fi gures
“This research
undermines the
hypothesis
that e-cigarettes are
a gateway drug
to smoking
conventional
cigarettes.”
that showed over 83 percent of 11-18-year olds in Britain
had never tried an e-cigarette.
They also discovered that not a single ‘never smoker’ teen
reported using an e-cigarette on a daily basis, and that
almost 50 percent of teenagers tried smoking a cigarette
before trying a vaping device.
This challenges the conception that there is a teen vaping
epidemic in the UK.
There are also fi ndings published in the leading medical
journal Thorax that demonstrates e-cigarettes are not a
gateway drug to tobacco usage.
One such study into teenage vaping concluded:
“Our research does not support the hypothesis that
e-cigarettes ‘renormalised’ youth smoking during a period
of growing, but largely unregulated use in the UK.”
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