E-cigarettes (Vaping) are the most popular product used for smoking
Two recently published analyses of a large nationally representative longitudinal study report that e-cigarettes are not effective in helping adults to quit smoking. However, more research is needed to identify whether these findings also extend to newer e-cigarette designs, which may deliver nicotine as effectively as cigarettes.
The analyses were led by University of California San Diego School of Medicine researchers using data from the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) Study, a longitudinal study of tobacco use and its effect on the health of people in the United States. The PATH Study, undertaken by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the FDA Center for Tobacco Products under contract to Westat, enrolled a nationally representative sample of 45,971 adults and youth between September 2013 and December 2014 and re-interviewed them annually for the first four years.
The analysis, published in the journal PLOS ONE, considered 2,770 daily smokers who reported trying to quit smoking during the first follow-up year; 23.5 percent used e-cigarettes in 2014-15 (before nicotine salt technology in e-cigarettes) to help with their quit attempt.
At the second follow-up one year later, 9.6 percent of e-cigarette users had been abstinent from smoking over the previous 12 months compared to 9.5 percent who did not use an e-cigarette and 10.2 percent who used neither an e-cigarette nor a pharmaceutical aid. There was no evidence that cessation rates differed between e-cigarette users and closely matched smokers who did not use e-cigarettes.
“Among this representative sample of smokers trying to quit, we found no evidence that e-cigarettes were helpful in the quit attempt,” said John P. Pierce, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Cancer Prevention at UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center and the study’s first author. “This lack of effectiveness was also apparent in the sub-sample who used e-cigarettes on a daily basis for this quit attempt.”
The second analysis, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology , considered 2,535 daily and non-daily smokers from the PATH Study’s wave 2 survey who reported making a quit attempt during the next follow-up year.
Seventeen percent of these used e-cigarettes to help with the quit attempt in 2015-16 (also before the increase in sales of e-cigarettes with nicotine salt technology). At the subsequent wave 4 follow-up survey, 13 percent reported not smoking for at least 12 months — a somewhat higher rate than the first analysis (PLOS One paper), attributed to the inclusion of non-daily smokers who are known to have higher quit rates.
Study authors said there was no evidence that cessation rates differed from closely matched smokers who did not use e-cigarettes. However, in this analysis, it was clear that participants who used e-cigarettes to quit smoking were less likely to be nicotine-free at follow-up. This was large because many of those who did quit smoking cigarettes were still using e-cigarettes, which also contain nicotine.
The study discovered that vapes are unsuccessful in reducing the habit at the population level.
