E-cigs preferred quit aid

Cigarette smokers in the US prefer electronic cigarettes to Food and Drug Administration-approved quit methods, according to a tobacco harm reduction expert citing a research brief authored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Office on Smoking and Health, RTI International and the University of North Carolina.

Writing on the Heartland Institute website, Dr. Brad Rodu, who holds the Endowed Chair in Tobacco Harm Reduction Research at the University of Louisville’s James Graham Brown Cancer Center and who is a Senior Fellow of the Heartland Institute, said that, using a nationally representative online survey of 15,943 adult smokers who tried to quit during the past three months, the researchers found that 75 percent used one or more methods to quit, and 25 percent used only one method.

‘E-cigarettes were far more popular single quit aids for partial or complete substitution (2.2 percent), compared with nicotine patches/gum (0.8 percent) or other prescription medicines (0.4 percent),’ Rodu wrote. ‘They were also more popular when more than one aid was used.

‘Participants here were current smokers.  A similar analysis performed on former smokers will show even more impressive effects from vaping.’

Rodu was disappointed by the survey authors’ response to the findings.

‘Despite the current study’s evidence of vaping’s popularity among smokers, the authors’ summation was understated: “Given that our data show that e-cigarettes are more commonly used for quit attempts than FDA-approved medications, further research is warranted on the safety and effectiveness of using e-cigarettes to quit smoking”.

‘The fact is that the CDC has documented with real-world data that e-cigarettes are preferred smoking cessation aids, negating the argument that evidence is merely “anecdotal”.

‘Our government should adopt the UK Royal College of Physicians’ position that “the hazard to health arising from long-term vapour inhalation from the e-cigarettes available today is unlikely to exceed 5 percent of the harm from smoking tobacco”.

‘In Britain e-cigs have been the leading quit-smoking aid since 2013.’

The Heartland Institute piece is at: http://blog.heartland.org/2017/04/cdc-e-cigarettes-more-popular-than-fda-approved-quitting-aids/.

It was first published at Tobacco Truth at http://rodutobaccotruth.blogspot.com.