February 21, 2017
Tomoyasu Hirano and colleagues just published “Electronic Cigarette Use and Smoking Abstinence in Japan: A Cross-Sectional Study of Quitting Methods” that adds to the already-strong case that smokers who use e-cigarettes are less, not more, likely to quit smoking.
They conducted a national cross-sectional study of 9055 people in Japan who had tried to quit smoking cigarettes in the last 5 years and found that people who used e-cigarettes were 38% less likely to have stopped smoking than people who didn’t use e-cigarettes. This finding of about a 1/3 drop in the odds of having quit is consistent with the meta-analysis of the entire available literature – including the few papers that showed increased quitting among e-cigarette users -- we published last year as well as other results published since then.
Here is the abstract:
February 15, 2017
There is strong and consistent evidence that exposure to secondhand smoke causes heart attacks and that smokefree workplace and public place laws cut heart attacks (and other diseases).
You would question that conclusion if you read the article in Slate by Jacob Grier, a one-time employee of the tobacco industry-supported Cato Institute and bartender, who tries to use the natural variability in results in different studies to argue against this fact.
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.