More evidence e-cigs may help in quitting tobacco
Electronic cigarette users followed over a year reduced or quit using tobacco cigarettes in large numbers and were less prone to resume smoking, at least in the short term.
Experts continue to debate whether or not “e-cigs” are smoking-cessation tools or just leisure products. The electronic vaporizers use cartridges of liquid nicotine to deliver a flavored nicotine-laced vapor without the byproducts of burning tobacco in traditional cigarettes.
“Our results may not be generalizable to all vapers,” Jean-Francois Etter said, using the slang for vaporizer users. “We had a majority of ex-smokers at baseline whereas in the general population, most vapers are current smokers,” he told Reuters Health.
Etter led the study at the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. The results were published in Addictive Behaviors.
A few small studies have found that e-cigarettes seemed to help smokers quit using tobacco or at least to smoke fewer traditional cigarettes. But there have been no long-term studies of how people actually use e-cigarettes, so experts are still unsure.
The researchers posted a questionnaire on a French stop-smoking website and asked sites selling e-cigs to link to the questionnaire. Most “vapers” buy their e-cigs online.
What are e-cigarettes?
E-cigarettes are battery operated nicotine inhalers that consist of a rechargeable lithium battery, a cartridge called a cartomizer and an LED that lights up at the end when you puff on the e-cigarette to simulate the burn of a tobacco cigarette. The cartomizer is filled with an e-liquid that typically contains the chemical propylene glycol along with nicotine, flavoring and other additives.
The device works much like a miniature version of the smoke machines that operate behind rock bands. When you “vape” - that’s the term for puffing on an e-cig - a heating element boils the e-liquid until it produces a vapor. A device creates the same amount of vapor no matter how hard you puff until the battery or e-liquid runs down.
The e-cig users recruited answered a baseline questionnaire, another one a month later and a third one year later. Questions covered e-cigarette use, tobacco use and the date of quitting tobacco, if one applied.
Of more than 1000 original recruits, 367 responded to all three surveys.
For those who had quit smoking already and were using e-cigarettes instead, six percent had relapsed to tobacco after one month. That number was stable after one year.
Of those who were smoking and using e-cigarettes when the study began, 22 percent had quit smoking tobacco after a month and 46 percent had quit after a year. That group averaged 11.3 tobacco cigarettes daily at the beginning of the study and six cigarettes per day after one month.
The electronic cigarette was introduced to the U.S. market in 2007 and offers the nicotine-addicted an alternative to smoking tobacco. Most “e-cigs” are similar enough in appearance to be mistaken for regular cigarettes, but one look inside and you’ll see the main difference: E-cigarettes don’t contain tobacco. Instead, there’s a mechanism that heats up liquid nicotine, which turns into a vapor that smokers inhale and exhale. Manufacturers and satisfied customers say that this nicotine vapor offers many advantages over traditional cigarette smoke. But regulatory agencies and some health experts aren’t sure. They’re asking questions about the possible side effects of inhaling nicotine vapor, as well as other health risks e-cigarettes may pose - both to users and to the public. Those calling for tight regulations on e-cigarettes claim that these devices should be deemed illegal until the proper research trials have been conducted to prove that they’re safe.
Because they contain no tobacco, e-cigarettes aren’t subject to U.S. tobacco laws, which means they can be purchased without proof of age, especially online. This raises concerns that e-cigs may be particularly appealing to kids and may encourage nicotine addiction among young people. And while manufacturers of the e-cigarette claim that it’s the cigarette you can “smoke” anywhere, regulatory agencies around the world are taking a close look at these gadgets and instituting a range of restrictions on their use.
Proponents of the e-cigarette say they feel better using the device than they did when they were smoking tobacco cigarettes, and that because the e-cigarette is reusable, it saves them money. Some praise the e-cig for helping them quit smoking. But is the e-cigarette as safe as its users - including celebrities like Katherine Heigl - believe? Is it a healthier option, or a riskier choice? And what does the FDA have to do with it? Before you consider taking up the e-cigarette habit, read on to get the facts.
This was just an exploratory study and will need confirmation from follow-up studies, Etter said.
“This suggests that e-cigs may help them quit, but our results need to be interpreted with caution, because of the dropout rate at follow-up and the fact that our sample is not representative of all vapers,” he said.