On October 6, 2022, FDA and CDC released data from the 2022 National Youth Tobacco Survey, a school-based, cross-sectional, self-administered survey of U.S. middle school (grades 6–8) and high school (grades 9–12) students.
The study was conducted from January to May 2022. According to the survey, 14.1% of U.S. high school students and 3.3% of middle school students reported having used an e-cigarette at least once in the last 30 days.
- This number is up slightly from 2021, when about 11.3% of high school students and 2.8% of middle school students reported using an e-cigarette at least once in the last month. That year, the survey was administered online as students around the country were engaged in remote learning due to COVID-19. As a result, FDA cautioned, “[d]ue to changes in methodology, including differences in survey administration and data collection procedures in recent years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the ability to compare estimates from 2022 with those from prior NYTS waves is limited; differences between estimates might be due to changes in methodology, actual behavior, or both.”
- Overall, the 2022 numbers indicate a sharp decline from the 19.6% of high school students and 4.7% of middle school students who reported previous-month e-cigarette use in 2020, the last time the survey was conducted completely in schools, and just after the federal legal age to purchase tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, was officially raised from 18 to 21 in January 2020. The year before, in 2019, past-30 day youth vaping peaked at 27.5% of high schoolers and 10.5% of middle schoolers:
Keller and Heckman – The Continuum of Risk – 2022-10-07.
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