A recent study conducted by investigators at the University of California, San Francisco shows that despite being dubbed a way to quit smoking, e-cigarettes may actually drive teenagers towards to conventional smoking and nicotine addiction.
“Despite claims that e-cigarettes are helping people quit smoking, we found that e-cigarettes were associated with more, not less, cigarette smoking among adolescents,” lead author Lauren Dutra, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco Centre for Tobacco Control Research and Education, said in a statement. “E-cigarettes are likely to be gateway devices for nicotine addiction among youth, opening up a whole new market for tobacco.”
The researchers analysed the smoking habits of about 38,000 middle school and high school students using data from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Youth Tobacco Survey.
In 2011, 3.1 percent of adolescents who answered the survey had tried e-cigarettes at least once (1.7 percent of them along with regular cigarettes). By 2012, the number rose to 6.5 percent (2.6 percent used them along with cigarettes and 4.1 percent used e-cigarettes only).
The researchers found that adolescents using e-cigarettes were more likely to experiment with smoking and become established cigarette smokers, as well as less likely to quit smoking after using these devices. Additionally, adolescents who smoked both conventional cigarettes and e-cigarettes smoked more cigarettes per day than non-e-cigarette users.
“Their exponential growth in recent years, including their rapid uptake among youths, makes it clear that policymakers need to act quickly,” wrote Frank Chaloupka, a professor of economics with the Institute for Health Research and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
News Source: www.thealmagest.com
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