E-cigarette users no more likely to quit than non-users in study Cigarette smokers who also used electronic cigarettes were no more likely to kick the smoking habit than those who did not, in a study that followed the smokers for a year. Some 90% of dual e-cigarette and combustible cigarette users were still smoking at the end of the 1-year study with no difference between them, according to the report in PLOS One. E-cigarette users were more likely to make smoking-cessation attempts than non-users were, but those attempts did not translate into greater success giving up combustible cigarettes, said the study's lead researcher, Scott Weaver, PhD, of Georgia State University in Atlanta. "We found that smokers who used e-cigarettes at initial contact or sometime during the next year had no higher rates of quitting than smokers who did not use e-cigarettes during this time period. In many instances, they had significantly lower quitting rates," he told MedPage Today. One study caveat, Weaver said, is that electronic cigarettes used when the study subjects were surveyed in 2015 and 2016 tended to deliver lower levels of nicotine than did newer-generation products, like the JUUL brand, that have become best sellers since then. "Most of these products did not match the nicotine-delivery profile of a cigarette, and many smokers who tried them told us in surveys that they found them to be insufficient for suppressing nicotine cravings," Weaver said. He and his colleagues conducted the population-based, prospective cohort study of a random probability sample of adult smokers participating in the August/September 2015 GfK KnowledgePanel survey program. The analysis included a total of 858 members of the national, probability-based web panel, designed to be representative of U.S. adults, who completed the initial survey in 2015 and also completed a follow-up survey in 2016. The primary study outcome was smoking abstinence for at least 30 days prior to follow-up, and secondary outcomes included making a quit attempt during the 12-month study period and the number of cigarettes smoked per day at follow-up. Smokers who used electronic nicotine-delivery systems (ENDS) were classified as daily users if they reported daily use of ENDS or using them for at least 25 days during the past 30 days at either baseline or follow-up (n = 53). To assess whether smokers were using ENDS for quitting or for other reasons, the researchers asked participants to indicate how important ENDS were to help them quit smoking regular cigarettes on a 7-point scale (0 = not at all important to 6 = very important). Quitting smoking was considered an important reason for using ENDS if a smoker gave a score of 3 or higher (n = 248). Among smokers who completed the follow-up survey, 27.1% (95% CI, 22.6%-32.0%) reported using ENDS at baseline; 1 year later, 90% of dual users were still smoking. Over half (53.5%, 95% CI, 43.5%-63.1%) of participants continued to smoke and use ENDS, and 37.4% (95% CI, 28.6%-47.1%) were still smoking but had discontinued ENDS. Only 9.2% (95% CI: 5.1%, 15.8%) reported having quit smoking at follow-up. "Our study suggests that use of current ENDS products in real-world conditions does not seem to improve the chances of quitting for smokers, and, under the current landscape, may not be the disruptive technology that increases the population quit rate and reduces the harm of combustibles," the researchers wrote. Still, there remains a need for low-harm and low-risk products that deliver nicotine at adequate levels while encouraging smokers to quit, Weaver and co-authors said. "While this paper advances the current evidence base by providing more recent data from the first longitudinal cohort study of a moderately large, nationally representative U.S. sample to address recently proposed quality standards, additional research is needed to reconcile the divergent literature and monitor the impact of ENDS in an environment of rapidly evolving markets and regulatory policies." Source
