February 10, 2017
Many people think about youth who start smoking as a homogenous group. Lauren Dutra, Nadra Lisha, Anna Song, and I have found that there are actually four different patterns of youth smoking (in addition to people who never smoke a cigarette).
Our paper, “Beyond experimentation: Five trajectories of cigarette smoking in a longitudinal sample of youth” in PLOS One. While the largest group of kids starts smoking around 12-13 and plateaus in terms of days smoked per month around age 20, there are also kids who only smoke very occasionally, and others who, while they start around 12-13, their smoking peaks around age 17, then dropps off. There are also “late escalators” who don’t even start until they are around 20.
Another important observation is that many of these kids never become daily smokers, which is relevant in the current e-cigarette discussions were some are discounting the value of 30-day smoking as a measure of adolescent and young adult smoking behavior.
There are several important implications:
February 10, 2017
As tobacco industry disinformation is spread throughout the internet, and tobacco industry-funded scientists use an array of venues and tactics to disseminate memes contrary to public health research, I stumbled upon an article from the Heartland Institute. This article (available at http://blog.heartland.org/2017/02/crops-and-carbon-dioxide-the-connectio... text copied below for archive) titled "Crops and Carbon Dioxide: The Connection is Clear," takes a perfectly fine botanical study about the effects of very low concentrations of ambient CO2 on the growth of certain species of plants, and extrapolates this innocuous study to infer that more CO2 means more plant growth.
Let's have a look at the text:
February 8, 2017
A new well-done study, “Nicotine, Carcinogen, and Toxin Exposure in Long-Term E-Cigarette and Nicotine Replacement Therapy Users: A Cross-sectional Study,” published in Annals of Internal Medicine, has been attracting a lot of attention from e-cigarette enthusiasts because it shows that levels of carcinogens in e-cigarette users’ bodies is much lower than when they smoke cigarettes.
This result is exactly what one would expect because it is well-established that e-cigarettes deliver much lower levels of most carcinogens than conventional cigarettes. E-cigarette advocates are using this paper to stress the value of switching from smoking cigarettes to e-cigarettes.
Everyone – including me – agrees that switching entirely from cigarettes to e-cigarettes (assuming no effects on cessation) would be a good thing.
The problem is, as this paper notes, that almost all e-cigarette users keep smoking cigarettes, so-called dual use. The paper (in their Figure 2) shows that the levels of carcinogens in dual users’ bodies is as high as if they smoke cigarettes.
February 8, 2017
Richard Miech and colleagues at the University of Michigan just published a very strong longitudinal study adding more details to not just that but also how and why e-cigarettes are a gateway to cigarette smoking. To date, all the studies of the relationship between e-cigarette use and smoking have shown a gateway effect.
Their study, “E-cigarette use as a predictor of cigarette smoking: Results from a 1-year follow-up of a national sample of 12th grade students,” published in Tobacco Control, examined several different aspects of the relationship between e-cigarette and cigarette use. Using the respected Monitoring the Future national sample, they showed that initiating with e-cigarettes both was followed by more than 4 times the odds of smoking cigarettes a year later. They also showed that e-cigarette use increased the likelihood of relapse to cigarette smoking among youth who had stopped smoking.
February 4, 2017
Sharon Lerner just posted a great story on efforts to redefine science to make issuing health regulations almost impossible. The people involved have lots of tobacco ties.
A couple paragraphs at the start of her story sum up the situation: