Does switching from cigarettes to e-cigarettes facilitate smoking cessation? Researchers investigating the incidence of relapse among smokers who had switched to e-cigarettes or other tobacco products found no evidence that switching prevents a relapse to cigarette smoking.
The results of their study were published in JAMA Network Open.
The researchers conducted a cohort study of smokers who smoked but had recently quit. They collected data from the US Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) study, using 4 annual waves from the Path study to identify 2 cohorts of people who had recently quit smoking cigarettes and who completed 2 follow-up surveys. This included 13,604 adults. The researchers then delved into whether those recent former smokers were still using some type of tobacco product.
They found that the more dependent on cigarettes a former smoker had been, the more likely they were to be using some sort of tobacco product at the first follow-up. “Those in the lowest tertile of dependence were less likely to use an e-cigarette than those in the highest tertile,” they noted, adding that people who viewed e-cigarettes as roughly equivalent to regular cigarettes in terms of harm potential had a lower prevalence of being tobacco-free at that first follow-up.
Jennifer Larson – Oncology Nurse Advisor – 2021-11-18.
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