January 29, 2018
Philip Morris International is promoting IQOS, its new “heat not burn” tobacco product, all over the world, including in Japan, as a healthier alternative to cigarettes.
A 2017 scientific paper tracked four years of Google searches for IQOS and other new tobacco products, including e-cigarettes and heat-not-burn products from other tobacco companies.
When the popular Japanese variety show "Ame Talk" featured IQOS, Google searches for IQOs skyrocketed and stayed much higher than competing products.
This is just the latest example of the power of entertainment media to push tobacco products.
January 27, 2018
Philip Morris claims that they only market IQOS to current smokers for “harm reduction” (ignoring the fact that their own evidence shows no reduction in harm in people who use them), but new data from Italy belies that claim.
In a new paper in Tobacco Control, ”Heat-not-burn tobacco products: concerns from the Italian experience,” Xiaoqiu Liu and colleagues find that nearly half (45%) of IQOS users are never cigarette smokers and over half (51%) of people who are interested in IQOS are never smokers.
While this is bad news for public health, it is great news for Philip Morris.
Regulators around the world should take note.-
The full cite for the paper is Liu X, Lugo A, Spizzichino L, et al. Heat-not-burn tobacco products: concerns from the Italian experience. Tobacco Control Published Online First: 26 January 2018. doi: 10.1136/tobaccocontrol-2017-054054 and it is available here.
January 27, 2018
I have been very concerned about the emerging for-profit marijuana industry turning into the new tobacco industry (reference 1, reference 2), with all the accompanying health problems that increase marijuana use will bring. At the same time, there are some medical benefits from marijuana and Melvin Livingston and colleagues recently published an interesting paper in American Journal of Public Health that showed that the rising trend of opioid-related deaths in Colorado reversed following legalization of recreational cannabis.
Their well-done paper, “Recreational Cannabis Legalization and Opioid-Related Death in Colorado, 2000-2015,” examined the trend in deaths for 4 years before and 2 years after recreational cannabis was legalized. As shown in the attached figure (from their paper) the rising trend in opioid deaths reversed.
January 27, 2018
Any smoking in the last 30 days is a standard measure of smoking behavior among adolescents. This measure is used rather than daily smoking because so few adolescents smoke daily.
Despite the fact that this measure has been used for years, e-cigarette enthusiasts have been critical of the consistent research showing a gateway effect for e-cigarettes leading to cigarette smoking on the grounds than 30 day smoking is not a good measure of adolescent smoking.
Lauren Dutra and I addressed this question, which is important beyond the e-cigarette debate, in our recent paper “Thirty-day smoking in adolescence is a strong predictor of smoking in young adulthood” published in Preventive Medicine. We used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth which recruited youth ages 12-16 in 1997 and followed them forward in time every year since then. We found that you who smoked any days in the last month were much more likely to be smokers as young adults. Kids who just smoked cigarettes one day a month had twice the odds of smoking as young adults as kids who did not smoke at all, with the odds of young adult smoking increasing for youth who smoked more days per month.
Here is the abstract:
January 26, 2018
Allan Hackshaw and colleagues just published “Low cigarette consumption and risk of coronary heart disease and stroke: meta-analysis of 141 cohort studies in 55 study reports” in BMJ that blows away the idea that e-cigarette users who cut down the number of cigarettes they smoke without quitting entirely will have health benefits, especially for heart disease and stroke.
Here is the BMJ press release on the paper, which sums it up nicely:
Just one cigarette a day carries much greater risk of heart disease and stroke than expected, warn experts
No safe level of smoking exists; smokers should aim to quit instead of cutting down
Smoking just one cigarette a day has a much higher risk of developing coronary heart disease and stroke than expected - about half the risk of smoking 20 per day - concludes a review of the evidence published by The BMJ today.