Vaping a life saver

Up to 6.6 million US cigarette smokers will live substantially longer than they otherwise would if cigarette smoking is replaced by vaping over a 10-year period, according to a Medical Xpress story citing research published in the journal Tobacco Control.

The study, by a research team led by investigators from the Georgetown Lombardi Cancer Center, Washington, DC, looked at a strategy of switching cigarette smokers to e-cigarette use in the US to accelerate tobacco control progress.

The team considered an optimistic and a pessimistic scenario, ‘differing in terms of the relative harms of e-cigarettes compared with cigarettes and the impact on overall initiation, cessation and switching’.

It found that, compared with the Status Quo, replacement of cigarette by e-cigarette use over a 10-year period yielded 6.6 million fewer premature deaths with 86.7 million fewer life years lost under the optimistic scenario. ‘Under the pessimistic scenario, 1.6 million premature deaths are averted with 20.8 million fewer life years lost,’ the team found. ‘The largest gains are among younger cohorts, with a 0.5 gain in average life expectancy projected for the age 15 years cohort in 2016.’

The team said that the tobacco control community had been divided regarding the role of e-cigarettes in tobacco control.

‘Our projections show that a strategy of replacing cigarette smoking with vaping would yield substantial life year gains, even under pessimistic assumptions regarding cessation, initiation and relative harm.’

The Medical Xpress story is at: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-10-years-life-smokers-e-cigarettes.html.

The Tobacco Control report is at: http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/early/2017/08/30/tobaccocontrol-2017-053759?papetoc=