E-cigarettes do not help quit smoking. Indeed, they would represent a “source of relapse”. A new study ofHerbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science The University of California San Diego, in partnership with the UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center, proves that vaping in no way helps smokers stay away from traditional cigarettes.
In the past, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has suggested that smokers who are unable to permanently quit smoking can benefit by replacing traditional cigarettes with electronic ones. However, until now no one had investigated whether this method actually avoided relapses, i.e. a return to traditional smoking rather than being the first step towards abstinence.
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The data just published on Jama Network Open examined the follow-up carried out between 2013 and 2015 on 13,604 smokers from the longitudinal study Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health conducted by National Institute on Drug Abuse e dal Fda Center for Tobacco Products.
9.4% of the sample quit smoking: half successfully, 41.5%, on the other hand, turned to another form of tobacco use, including electronic cigarettes. And in particular this subgroup showed 8.5 percentage points more likely to return to smoking as before, compared to the other alternatives.
“Our findings suggest that people who quit smoking and switched to e-cigarettes or other tobacco products actually increased their risk of relapse,” explains lead author. John Pierce, professor of Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health. “Quitting is the most important thing a smoker can do to improve their health, but evidence indicates that switching to e-cigarettes has made it less likely, not more likely, to stay out of this addiction.”
This is the first study to thoroughly examine “whether switching to a less harmful nicotine source can be maintained over time without relapse into cigarette smoking,” he added. “If switching to e-cigarettes were a viable way to quit smoking, then those who switched to vaping should have much lower relapse rates than cigarette smoking. But we found no evidence of this.”
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Those who switched to e-cigarettes were more likely to have higher incomes, higher tobacco addiction scores, and consider vaping to be less harmful than traditional smoking. “Our goal was to assess whether recent former smokers who switched to e-cigarettes or another tobacco product were less likely to relapse into cigarette smoking than those who had decided to quit,” he clarifies. Karen knife, head professor of the Biostatistics Division of the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health.
Instead, he outlined the profile of those who change habits and then return to the old ones. “While people who opted to vape were more likely to relapse into smoking, they were also more likely to attempt to quit again. Further follow-up is now needed to identify if this is evidence of a chronic relapse pattern at the time. smoke or is part of an early advance towards abstinence “.
Cigarettes cause seven million deaths a year. But e-cigarettes have also been shown to have “a significant role in causing cardiovascular, lung and neurological disease, as well as cancer.” As the doctor explains Holly Middlekauff of the David Geffen School of Medicine Ucla in the study published in Jama Pediatrics also “a single 30-minute vaping session can significantly increase cellular oxidative stress” and affect the health of even healthy young non-smokers, triggering a series of “negative and irreversible” changes.
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