E-Cigs Encourage Smoking in Teens: Study

A new study has found that e-cigarette use in teens actually encourages nicotine habits of all kinds, including traditional cigarette smoking, confirming what health officials and some legislators have long feared.

The study, which was published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics, found data that implies that e-cigarette use is just as much a gateway into regular tobacco smoking habits as traditional cigarette experimentation is in youths.

To determine this, researchers preformed cross-sectional analyses of survey data from nearly 40,000 U.S. middle school and high school students between 2011 and 2012 as part of the National Youth Tobacco Survey. Analysis of the data found that among teens that have experimented with traditional cigarettes (1 puff or more) the use of an electronic cigarette even once raised the likelihood of more regular traditional tobacco product smoking by about 6.31 percent. Even among non-experimenters, more regular e-cigarette use was associated with an increase in chances of eventual supplementation of traditional cigarettes.

Despite claims that electronic cigarettes can help smokers quit the habit, electronic cigarettes appeared to have a negative effect on teens who regularly smoked cigarettes but intended to quit, lowering the chances of a cigarette smoker achieving a 30-day, six month, or one year period of abstinence from tobacco. It should be noted that e-cigarettes are not tobacco-based products, meaning that exclusively "vaping" e-cigarettes does not break the abstinence.

The study concluded that use of e-cigarettes among teens is associated with higher odds of an adolescent ever smoking regular cigarettes. Interestingly, while e-cigarettes users did reported plans to quit smoking traditional tobacco products more frequently than exclusive cigarettes smokers, they also appeared to have a harder time actually achieving abstinence from cigarettes.

Legislators across the country have been warning that electronic cigarettes may serve as a "gateway" into more regular smoking among teens for some time, but this is one of the first studies that provide evidence supporting this hypothesis.

The study was published in JAMA Pediatrics on March 6.