According to an American study, 20% of teenage regular vapers who tested this product before smoking become regular smokers in the following year.
Is the e-cigarette a gateway to smoking? This is the endless question that all smoking experts ask themselves. And a few days ago, it was bad news that the vaping camp recorded.
According to a study published in the journal Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), young vapers who have never smoked a conventional cigarette are more likely to fall into smoking than those who have not tested e-cigarettes. To reach this conclusion, scientists in California followed more than 3,000 15-year-old American high school students for more than a year.
Occasional vapers at risk
And the results are final. Six months after the start of the experiment, about 20% of regular vapers have become regular smokers, and more than 11.5% of them have become occasional smokers, reveals the team at the University of California of South. The finding is just as worrying among occasional vapers (those who had tested the product once or twice at the start of the study). Of this population, 9% became occasional smokers and 5% became regular smokers six months after their first vaping. These figures are each higher than among young people who have never experimented with e-cigarettes.
Finally, the study concludes that vaping, regardless of the frequency, is linked to cigarette consumption up to four times greater than that of young people who have never vaped, the researchers report. As a comment to this work, Prof. Adam M. Leventhal, lead author of the study, confides: “There is still a lot of unknowns on this link, but the transition between vaping and smoking may warrant special attention in the anti-smoking policy ”.
Contrary results among French teens
The researcher will however find it difficult to convince supporters of the vape. Especially since the latter have recently shown the opposite. After being worried, Professor Bertrand Dautzenberg, pulmonologist at the Pitié Salpêtrière hospital, said he was “convinced that the e-cigarette is more a competitor of tobacco than a gateway to smoking among adolescents ”. With supporting results. Those of the annual surveys of the Paris Sans Tabac association conducted since 1991 on students in middle and high schools in Paris.
The latest data indeed showed the “unexpected” drop in smoking since the appearance of e-cigarettes among adolescents. Between 2013 and 2016, the rate of smokers (exclusive or not) among 12-15 year olds increased from 15.5% to 7.1% while the vaping rate, during the month, remained stable (4.1% at 3.9%). Similarly, among 16-19 year olds, the rate of smokers (exclusive or not) drops from 39.5% to 29% while the rate of vaping, during the month, remains stable (8.3% to 9.2 %).
And Professor Dautzenberg concludes in Why actor, “My conclusion is that it is of course preferable not to have any consumption of tobacco or e-cigarette, but in terms of initiation of smoking as in terms of quitting smoking, the use of this the latter constitutes risk reduction, which must be encouraged, even if it must be monitored and supervised ”.
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