More adolescent e-cigarette users report vaping within five minutes of waking up, new study finds

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Although the prevalence of e-cigarette use among teens has declined in recent years, those who do vape are starting younger and they’re using e-cigarettes more intensely, a new study suggests.

Among adolescents who only use e-cigarettes, the percentage who used the products within the first five minutes of waking up in a day was less than 1% between the years 2014 and 2017, but that shifted to 10.3% from 2017 through 2021, according to the study published Monday in the medical journal JAMA Network Open.

“This increase in intensity may reflect increasing use of nicotine for self-medication in response to increases in adolescent depression, anxiety, tic disorders, and suicidality that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the researchers – from San Francisco and Massachusetts General Hospital – wrote in the study.

“The pandemic has also been a lost year for school-based prevention and treatment efforts, meaning that abatement plans will need to be intensified to address the nicotine addiction in those adolescents who missed a year of contact with adults who might have otherwise helped them get treatment.”

The researchers analyzed self-reported data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Youth Tobacco Surveys and Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System. The data included a total of 151,573 survey respondents, all in middle or high school in the United States.

The data showed that, between 2014 and 2021, the age at which adolescents first started using e-cigarettes decreased and the intensity of their use increased – rising from using e-cigarettes about nine or fewer days a month to 10 or more days a month.

The researchers found that the average age at first use got younger over time, by about 1.9 months per calendar year, for e-cigarettes but remained stable for other tobacco products. The mean age of survey respondents was 14.5 years old.

Among adolescents who currently use any type of tobacco product, the proportion whose first-ever use of a product at a young age was an e-cigarette increased from 27.2% in 2014 to 78.3% in 2019, and remained at 77% in 2021, according to the data.

‘Concerning’ trends in the intensity of use

The overall prevalence of e-cigarette use peaked in 2019 and then declined. But by 2019, more e-cigarette users were using within the first five minutes of waking up each day compared with traditional cigarette users.

Read full article here.

Jacqueline Howard – CNN Health – 2022-11-17.

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