February 12, 2018
A new paper based on a large sample of smokers across the European Union, E-cigarettes Associated with Depressed Smoking Cessation: A Cross-sectional Study of 28 European Union Countries was just published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. University of California researchers Margarete Kulik, Nadra Lisha and Stanton Glantz found that in the European Union smokers who use e-cigarettes are less, not more, likely to quit smoking.
An additional analysis pulling out the data from Great Britain alone showed the same thing: smokers who use e-cigarettes are less likely to quit smoking than smokers who do not use e-cigarettes.
This paper is the first large scale study of the relationship between e-cigarette use and quitting smoking compared to people who do not use e-cigarettes in the EU.
The results based on a cross-sectional survey of 12,608 ever smokers conducted by Eurobarometer are consistent with most other studies of real-world e-cigarette use.
February 9, 2018
When I got emails from people asking me what I thought about Public Health England’s latest report on e-cigarettes that recommended allowing e-cigarette use in hospitals and by pregnant women, I thought it was a joke, real fake news.
But it is real, so here are some reactions to their press release (reproduced below):
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PHE publishes independent expert e-cigarettes evidence review |
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February 6, 2018
Minimum Legal Sales Age laws for e-cigarettes associated with less or the same cigarette smoking among adolescents
Lauren Dutra, colleagues at the CDC, and I just published “Impact of E-Cigarette Minimum Legal Sale Age Laws on Current Cigarette Smoking” in Journal of Adolescent Health that found that states with age requirements for e-cigarette purchases have the same or less adolescent cigarette smoking compared to states without these age requirements. The results of this study suggest that these minimum age of sale policies benefit youth.
We analyzed tobacco product use, including e-cigarettes, from over 80,000 adolescents across the United States and found that the amount of adolescent cigarette smoking was less or the same in states with age requirements on e-cigarettes compared to states without these laws.
February 3, 2018
Kelly Young-Wolff and colleagues’ new paper, “Documentation of e-cigarette use and associations with smoking from 2012 to 2015 in an integrated healthcare delivery system” provides further insight into the dynamic relationship between e-cigarette and cigarette use. They collected information on e-cigarette and cigarette use for 7926 people aged 12 and older enrolled in the Kaiser Permanente HMO in Northern California in 2014 and compared that behavior to what products they were using a year later. They found three distinct linked behaviors:
- Cigarette smokers who used e-cigarettes at baseline were less likely to be smoking cigarettes a year later, i.e., e-cigarettes were helping people quit cigarettes
BUT
January 30, 2018
It is an article of faith at the FDA and among e-cigarette enthusiasts that nicotine is not carcinogenic and that e-cigarettes do not pose any substantial cancer risk because the levels of carcinogens in e-cigarette aerosol is much lower than in a conventional cigarette.
These beliefs are challenged by a recent paper, “E-cigarette smoke damages DNA and reduces repair
activity in mouse lung, heart, and bladder as well as in human lung and bladder cells,” by Hyun-Wook Lee and colleagues at NYU. They exposed live mice to light levels of e-cigarette aerosol and found damage to the DNA in lung, heart and bladder cells as well as in human lung and bladder cells. They found that the cells themselves converted nicotine to carcinogenic NNN and NNK even if it was not in the original e-cigarette aerosol. They also found that exposure to nicotine and e-cigarette aerosol damaged normal DNA repair mechanisms.
Here is how they sum up the significance of their findings: