18 August, 2017
Now, over a year later, a new study has emerged-with the exact opposite conclusion: More than half of daily e-cig users in America have quit smoking traditional cigarettes in the last five years, compared to just 28% of adult smokers who have never vaped before, according to a study from Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health published in the journal Addictive Behaviors.
When first asked, around a third of students had ever tried e-cigarettes, and nearly half of those had never smoked.
E-cigarettes are widely considered to be a safer alternative to smoking.
In 2015, Public Health England published a detailed review of the evidence around the safety of e-cigarettes and said, at best guess, they were 95% less toxic than conventional cigarettes. It is important to enforce these measures effectively and remain vigilant by closely monitoring e-cigarette use in minors'.
For a number of years, my colleagues and I have been tracking data from several thousand schoolchildren in England to assess the impact of various anti-smoking interventions. But the studies suggesting that experimentation with e-cigarettes may act as a gateway to smoking in adolescents have been carried out in the US.
We started by looking at those children, aged 14 and 15, who had not smoked.
She stressed that regular vaping remained uncommon among United Kingdom teens and although there was a need to continue to monitor the potential impact of vaping on young people, it was hardly surprising that those who smoked were more likely to have vaped and vice versa. Of note, however, 19.9% of adolescents surveyed said they had tried e-cigarettes at baseline but had never smoked. This is worrying because it is known that once someone starts to smoke, the chances that they will continue to smoke are high.
Official statistics show that e-cigarette usage is increasing while tobacco cigarette usage is decreasing among young people in the UK. It is a question that gets to the heart of the risks that might be associated with e-cigarette use among the young.
Young people who described themselves as occasional smokers and had also tried e-cigarettes were almost twice as likely to try a traditional cigarette in the 12-month period compared with others who tried smoking but had never tried an e-cigarette (12.9% compared to 24.2%).
Starting to smoke over the next 12 months was significantly more common among those who had friends and two or three family members who smoked.
Again, the picture in the USA seems very similar to what we found in the UK.
These fears have been inflamed by a series of studies from the United States which have warned many teenagers use the gadgets, attracted by the exotic flavours on offer - and that they are more likely to "graduate" to smoking tobacco later.
But it was strongly associated with e-cigarette use, particularly among those without friends who smoked-a group usually thought to be less vulnerable to taking up smoking.
So what do the associations suggest is going on?
"With e-cigarette use being such a recent phenomenon further long term studies are required to determine if e-cigarette use really causes an increase in smoking in adolescents", said Connor. At the outset, 61.5% had not tried e-cigarettes or cigarettes, 16.0% had tried e-cigarettes but not cigarettes, 4.4% had tried cigarettes but not e-cigarettes and 18.2% had used both.
The study covered a short period of time, and so can't say what happened to the students' smoking and vaping habits, and whether or not they became regular smokers.
