Vapor Technology Association
A major new study provides the strongest evidence yet that vaping can help smokers quit cigarettes, with e-cigarettes proving nearly twice as effective as nicotine gums and patches.
The British research, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, could influence what doctors tell their patients and shape the debate in the U.S., where the Food and Drug Administration has come under pressure to more tightly regulate the burgeoning industry amid a surge in teenage vaping.
The debate over the potential harms and benefits of vaping has raged on for years. But the results of a large trial in the UK have provided the pro-vaping side its biggest win yet. It found that people trying to quit smoking were almost twice as likely to succeed over a year’s time if they used electronic cigarettes compared to people who stuck to typical nicotine replacement therapy.
The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday, recruited nearly 900 smokers in the UK. All of the smokers had gone to dedicated centers to help them quit. There, they were randomly assigned one of two interventions.
For those who want to kick their smoking habit, switching to electronic cigarettes may offer better odds of success than nicotine patches, lozenges or gum, new research suggests.
The finding follows a small year-long study that tracked about 120 British smokers enrolled in a National Health Service smoking cessation program.
“E-cigarettes provide nicotine, which is important when someone is trying to quit smoking,” said study author Dunja Przulj. “Going ‘cold turkey’ with no nicotine can make it difficult to deal with nicotine withdrawal symptoms. Having some kind of nicotine replacement improves your chances of quitting,” she explained.
For those who want to kick their smoking habit, switching to electronic cigarettes may offer better odds of success than nicotine patches, lozenges or gum, new research suggests.
The finding follows a small year-long study that tracked about 120 British smokers enrolled in a National Health Service smoking cessation program.
“E-cigarettes provide nicotine, which is important when someone is trying to quit smoking,” said study author Dunja Przulj. “Going ‘cold turkey’ with no nicotine can make it difficult to deal with nicotine withdrawal symptoms. Having some kind of nicotine replacement improves your chances of quitting,” she explained.
“In our study, smokers used e-cigarettes much like other nicotine replacement treatments. They were asked to set a ‘quit day,’ and advised to use their e-cigarette regularly throughout the day, and whenever they felt they needed it,” Przulj added. “Everyone was encouraged to try and avoid smoking any normal cigarettes.”
In the end, study results suggested that “e-cigarettes would almost double your chances of quitting at one year compared to nicotine replacement [products],” she reported.
Przulj is a research health psychologist with the Health and Lifestyles Research Unit at Queen Mary University of London.
For the roughly 15 percent of Americans who smoke, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not approved e-cigs as a means for quitting.
But as a practical matter, the investigators noted that more American smokers chose e-cigs as a cessation tool than FDA-approved treatments.
In the British study group, a total of 79 smokers were enrolled in an “e-cig group” and given a refillable e-cigarette to use. The remaining 44 smokers were given a three-month supply of any approved nicotine replacement product they wanted.
In the end, the investigators found that while nearly 10 percent of the nicotine replacement group were not smoking traditional cigarettes a year later, that figure nearly doubled, to 18 percent, among those using e-cigs to quit.
The study team acknowledged, however, that prior research has demonstrated that when nicotine replacement products are paired with prescription medications — such as the nicotine receptor blocker Chantix (varenicline) and/or bupropion — one year abstinence rates are the same or higher as the e-cig results.
What’s more, 80 percent of those in the study’s e-cig group were still using e-cigs at the one-year mark. This compared with just 9 percent of those in the nicotine replacement products group by that point.
So, might encouraging smokers to rely on e-cigarettes to help kick their habit raise the risk that quitters just end up swapping out one form of nicotine addiction for another? Przulj thinks that’s a risk definitely worth taking.
“E-cigarettes are at least 95 percent less risky than cigarettes,” she said, “and so even if someone is still using an e-cigarette, the benefits outweigh any cons.”
In fact, “doctors should encourage any smokers to try e-cigarettes,” Przulj suggested, “especially if they have tried other methods before and these have not been helpful.”
It has been one of the most pressing unanswered questions in public health: Do e-cigarettes actually help smokers quit? Now, the first, large rigorous assessment offers an unequivocal answer: yes.
The study, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that e-cigarettes were nearly twice as effective as conventional nicotine replacement products, like patches and gum, for quitting smoking.
The success rate was still low — 18 percent among the e-cigarette group, compared to 9.9 percent among those using traditional nicotine replacement therapy — but many researchers who study tobacco and nicotine said it gave them the clear evidence they had been looking for.
“This is a seminal study,” said Dr. Neal L. Benowitz, chief of clinical pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco, an expert in nicotine absorption and tobacco-related illnesses, who was not involved in the project. “It is so important to the field.”
The study was conducted in Britain and funded by the National Institute for Health Research and Cancer Research UK. For a year, it followed 886 smokers assigned randomly to use either e-cigarettes or traditional nicotine replacement therapies. Both groups also participated in at least four weekly counseling sessions, an element regarded as critical for success.
The findings could give some new legitimacy to e-cigarette companies like Juul, which have been under fire from the government and the public for contributing to what the Food and Drug Administration has called an epidemic of vaping among teenagers. But they could also exacerbate the difficulty of keeping the devices away from young people who have never smoked while making them available for clinical use.
“There is an unavoidable tension between protecting kids from e-cigarettes and smoking cessation, which is also very important,” Dr. Benowitz said.
Tobacco use causes nearly 6 million deaths worldwide each year, including 480,000 in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If tobacco use trends continue, the global death tally is projected to reach 8 million deaths annually by 2030.
E-cigarettes provide the nicotine smokers crave without the toxic tar and carcinogens that come from inhaling burning tobacco. But regulators in the United States, Britain and elsewhere have not approved them to be marketed as smoking cessation tools.
E-cigarettes are almost twice as effective at helping smokers quit as nicotine replacement therapies such as lozenges and patches, according to a new study that immediately stoked the debate over whether e-cigarettes are an important smoking-cessation tool or a health menace.
The study, published online Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine, is the first randomized trial to test the effectiveness of modern e-cigarettes vs. nicotine-replacement products, said Peter Hajek, a psychologist at Queen Mary University of London, who led the trial. The researchers found that 18 percent of the e-cigarette users were smoke-free after a year, compared with 9.9 percent of those in the nicotine-replacement group. The participants also received behavioral support to stop smoking.
I used to be a smoker. It was stupid, I know, but I did it for a very long time. I’m not alone, not unique, plenty of people made that same choice I did to take up the nasty habit when we were young and convinced we were invincible. Like tens of millions of Americans, I managed to quit and haven’t looked back. I would still be smoking today if not for the miracle (and it is indeed a miracle) of the e-cigarette. I vaped like a madman…and it was my bridge to a much healthier and happier lifestyle.
New Jersey is home to a beautiful coastline as its rivers, bays and estuaries are a treasure. At the Recreational Fishing Alliance, of which I am executive director, we are committed to protecting the rights of recreational fisherman and a big part of that effort is keeping waterways clean.
Across the United States, Americans are making important steps to cut down on products that pollute waterways. As plastic straws and bags continue to decline, another challenge in keeping the shores and water clean is cigarette butts. According to a study done by the American Legacy Foundation, cigarette butts remain the most littered item in the U.S. and anyone who fishes the coastline witnesses hundreds of floating butts.
As a lifelong fisherman and advocate for anglers, I’ve seen firsthand the environmental impact of cigarette butts. New Jersey has some of the best fishing grounds anywhere on the East Coast, and as responsible anglers we have a responsibility to keep our waterways clean.
As an organization we do not endorse smoking of any kind or any tobacco product. However we can support new technologies like vapor products that help adult smokers quit the nicotine addiction.
We all strive for a cleaner and healthier New Jersey. I hope our state and federal officials will work to ensure that vaping technologies are available to adults who rely on these products to help quit smoking and keep New Jersey’s waterways clean for all anglers.
The FDA is tied in knots over e-cigarette use. On the one hand, the FDA does not want people to smoke. But, on the other hand, the FDA does not want people to use smoking alternatives that could help them quit, such as e-cigarettes. To that end, the FDA recently signaled its interest in increasing regulation of e-cigarettes including Altria’s MarkTen and British American Tobacco’s Vuse, with an eye towards protecting teens from potential health effects.
As FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb put it:
[Some say] in order to protect kids, [the FDA] is going to encumber adult smokers by putting in place restrictions that make these products less attractive, or harder to purchase by adults. These things may all be true.
But although the commissioner recognizes new regulation could negatively impact adult e-cigarette consumers, he does not consider that new restrictions may disproportionately affect the poor.
This is likely for three reasons. First, low-income and low-skill Americans are more likely to smoke traditional cigarettes, and more likely to smoke traditional cigarettes heavily. For example, the CDC finds the prevalence of smoking is around two times as high for smokers below the U.S. poverty line as for smokers at twice the poverty level. Likewise, adults with less than a high school education are more than 2.5 times as likely to smoke as adults with a college degree.
Second, when it comes to quitting smoking, poor and less-educated Americans have the hardest time. A CDC report suggests that smokers with less than a high school degree are less than half as likely to report recently quitting smoking as smokers with graduate degrees. And adults at or above the poverty level are more likely to report recently quitting than those below the poverty level.
Evidence suggests e-cigarettes are an easy way for poor American smokers to improve their health. Unfortunately, future restrictions may change that.
Third, poor and less-educated Americans are more likely to use e-cigarettes. According to a recent study, 10.2 percent of individuals in households with between $0-$20,000 of income have used e-cigarettes, whereas about half as many individuals in households with $75,000 of annual income or more have used e-cigarettes. Education levels break the same way: Around twice as many individuals with less than a high school degree have ever used an e-cigarette, compared to individuals with a college degree or more.
Why does this matter? Low income and less-educated Americans report lower levels of access to health care and poorer health outcomes along a variety of metrics. E-cigarettes ostensibly provide an affordable avenue to improve health for smokers that can’t afford professional help quitting or reducing cigarette use.
We have aggressively pushed industry and policy makers to adopt marketing standards to eliminate potential appeal to youth.
