New Study Purports to Show that E-Cigs are a Gateway to Smoking, But Provides No Evidence to Support that Conclusion

This study provides evidence that ecigarettes are recruiting lower risk adolescents to smoking, which has public health implications. "The Rest of the StoryThe rest of the story is that this study doesnot actually provide evidence that e-cigarettes are recruiting youths to smoking. What it shows is that experimentation with e-cigarettes is a much more sensitive marker of propensity to smoking than simply assessing rebelliousness or parental support or intentions to smoke.The major problem with the study is that it does not examine whether or not youth who experiment with e-cigarettes become addicted to vaping and then progress to smoking, which would be indicative of a gateway effect. Instead, it compares youth who have simply tried e-cigarettes with youth who never even had a puff of an e-cigarette. The study does not document thatany of the youth who experimented with e-cigarettes actually became regular vapers or that they were addicted to vaping before progressing to smoking.In fact, the paper hides a critical piece of information: although 29% of the high school students in the sample had experimented with e-cigarettes,only 2% were using them more than once a week. Therefore, at least98% of the e-cigarette experimenters were clearly not addicted to vaping and could not be considered regular vapers.The key problem is that the study did not determine the trajectory of e-cigarette use prior to the initiation of smoking. It is entirely possible that many of the youth who had...
Source: The Rest of the Story: Tobacco News Analysis and Commentary - Category: Addiction Source Type: blogs