Potential gateway effect from vaping to tobacco consumption

A new study, published November 9 in the journal Pediatrics[1], finds that e-cigarette use in the United States is associated with a higher risk of smoking among adolescents who had no prior intention to smoke.

The researchers looked at data from more than 8,500 American adolescents, ages 12 to 17, who had never smoked. This data was collected as part of the study “Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health” (PATH), a nationally representative cohort study conducted jointly by the National Institutes of Health And the US Food and Drug Administration on smoking from 2014 to 2016.

Thus, nearly 10% of the adolescents surveyed who smoke tobacco were former vapers, while the proportion is only 1.5% among those who had never vaped before.

The relative rate of progression to smoking among e-cigarette users compared with never e-cigarette users/smokers was higher among those who did not intend to smoke cigarettes than those who did intend to smoke: 17% of e-cigarette users, compared with 10% of non-e-cigarette users, switched to conventional tobacco cigarettes.

These results are instructive for public policies to prevent smoking among adolescents and young adults. To prevent people from starting to smoke, it is not just a matter of restricting access to tobacco products but also, more generally, to all nicotine products, including vaping products. This involves reducing their accessibility and prohibiting any promotion of them to young people.

The increase in the consumption of vaping products among young people is also observed in Europe. According to the latest European survey on alcohol and other drugs[2], 40% of 15-16 year old students have already tried the electronic cigarette, 14% are regular consumers and almost a quarter of European students who have tried the electronic cigarette were non-smokers.

©Generation Without Tobacco

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Keywords: Study, youth, vaping, USA [1] Olusegun Owotomo, Haley Stritzel, Sean Esteban McCabe, Carol J. Boyd, Julie Maslowsky, Smoking Intention and Progression From E-Cigarette Use to Cigarette Smoking, Pediatrics Nov 2020, e2020002881; DOI: 10.1542/peds.2020-002881 [2] EMCDDA and ESPAD (2019), ESPAD Report 2019 — Results from the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs, EMCDDA–ESPAD joint publications, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg. National Committee Against Smoking |