Snus use can protect against smoking

A Norwegian researcher says that snus seems to protect against smoking if the snus-taking debut does not happen too early during adolescence, according to a Reuters story.

Ingeborg Lund, a researcher with the Norwegian Institute for Alcohol and Drug Research – SIRUS, in Oslo, said it was particularly important to keep teenagers tobacco-free until they were at least 16 years old.

Lund and her colleague, Janne Scheffels, published their study in Nicotine and Tobacco Research.

They analyzed surveys of Norwegian teenagers and adults conducted from 2005 to 2011. Out of 8,313 people who took part in the surveys, 409 were long-term snus users who had started using snus before cigarettes or who had never used cigarettes.

Lund and Scheffels found that about 23 percent of early snus users were current smokers at the time of the survey, compared to only 6 percent of people who started using snus when they were older.

The Reuters story is at http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/17/us-kids-snus-idUSBREA1G16T20140217.