Vaping could help people quit smoking, study says

Health

By Amy Eisinger

If one of your resolutions was to quit smoking, vaping might be just the thing you need. 

New research shows that people who start using e-cigarettes stop smoking tobacco cigarettes entirely. The latest findings, published Wednesday in Tobacco & Nicotine Research, flies in the face of previous work where scientists reported most people who vaped kept right on using old school, or combustible, cigarettes as well. 

“Our findings here suggest that the times have changed when it comes to vaping and smoking cessation,” study co-author Karin Kasza of Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, NY, said in a press release.

Between 2013 and 2016, the number of people who quit smoking was virtually identical among both e-cigarette users and traditional smokers: 15.5% of e-cigarette users quit and 15.6% of smokers quit. 

But since then, things have shifted. From 2016 to 2017 and again from 2018 to 2019, 20.1% of e-cigarette users stopped smoking, compared to just 16.5% of those who did not vape. The same trend continued through 2021: 30.9% of e-cigarette users stopped smoking, compared to just 20% who did not use e-cigarettes. 

Researchers aren’t sure why the shift occurred, but they speculate it could have something to do with how well e-cigarettes deliver nicotine.

“While our study doesn’t give the answers as to why vaping is associated with cigarette quitting in the population today when it wasn’t associated with quitting years ago, design changes leading to e-cigarettes that deliver nicotine more effectively should be investigated,” Kasza said.

Since vaping hit the market roughly 20 years ago, research has been mixed on whether the electronic devices, which are especially popular among teens and 20-somethings, can be a helpful tool in quitting smoking. This latest study adds to another small clinical trial done earlier this year that backs up the same idea. 

In February, the New England Journal of Medicine published a trial that showed that almost 30% of smokers who were given free e-cigarettes and counseling were still tobacco free at the six-month mark, compared to just over 16% who received standard counseling. 

Those researchers proposed that vaping is helpful because it mimics cigarettes in the delivery of nicotine, versus the way that a nicotine patch or gum works.

“Switching over to an e-cigarette, where you can have more frequent and multiple, smaller hits of nicotine rather than a flat, kind of plateaued-like amount of nicotine over a longer period of time, is going to be more useful for patients who are already addicted to cigarettes because it mimics their cigarette pattern,” Dr. Richard Stumacher, of Northwell Health in New York, who was not involved with the study, told MedPage Today at the time. 

Still, experts caution against vaping as a cure-all. Quitting nicotine use entirely is still the healthiest thing a person can do — even if they’ve been smoking or vaping for years. And some doctors feel that simply replacing one type of nicotine for another, regardless of the method of delivery, isn’t solving anything.

“I would not see these data as encouraging or suggestive that electronic cigarettes enable adults to quit smoking. They are replacing nicotine usage from one type to another, which will not result in true smoking cessation,” Dr. Farrah Kheradmand, who was not involved with the study, told MedPage Today.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) also agrees. 

“There are no safe tobacco products,” the FDA notes on their website. The latest National Youth Tobacco Survey estimates that more than 2.1 million young people use e-cigarettes daily. Vaping can lead to a variety of health concerns, including shortened attention spans, dizziness, headaches, vomiting and more.