Medical Journal Retracts Vaping Study for Political, Rather than Scientific Reasons

The journalBMC Public Health has announced that it will be retracting apaper it published last October which concluded that the use of electronic cigarettes has helped accelerate the decline in cigarette smoking. The study, entitled " Population-level counterfactual trend modelling to examine the relationship between smoking prevalence and e-cigarette use among US adults, " analyzed U.S. population-based data on trends in e-cigarette consumption and smoking prevalence from approximately 8 years prior to when e-cigarettes became popular in the U.S. through 2019. The authors used adult cigarette prevalence trends from 1999-2009 to establish a baseline and then generated the counterfactual (what would have been expected in the absence of e-cigarettes) by continuing these trends through 2019. They then compared the predicted trend in smoking prevalence from 2010-2019 with the actual trend. They found major discrepancies between the predicted and observed prevalence of smoking, with smoking rates dropping much more rapidly than expected. The magnitude of the " excess " decline in smoking correlated highly with greater prevalence of e-cigarette use. Furthermore, discrepancies between expected and observed levels of smoking were greater among subgroups with higher levels of e-cigarette use: young adults, adult males, and non-Hispanic White adults. The article concluded that: " Population-level data suggest that smoking prevalence has dropped faster than expected, in ways ...
Source: The Rest of the Story: Tobacco News Analysis and Commentary - Category: Addiction Source Type: blogs