E-Cigarettes/ Vaping Doesn’t Help Smoking Cesation New Study Finds

You’ve probably heard people say that e-cigarettes (or vaping) can help people stop smoking.

The latest research has debunked this theory as a myth.

The new research findings were published in the October 2021 issue of JAMA Network Open. Stating that

“Our findings suggest that individuals who quit smoking and switched to e-cigarettes or other tobacco products actually increased their risk of a relapse back to smoking over the next year by 8.5 percentage points compared to those who quit using all tobacco products.”

These new findings completely contradict the previous advice published by The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Whereby the CDC suggested that switching to e-cigarettes can help people looking to give up smoking.

“Quitting is the most important thing a smoker can do to improve their health, but the evidence indicates that switching to e-cigarettes made it less likely, not more likely, to stay off of cigarettes,”

advised first author John P. Pierce, PhD, Distinguished Professor at the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center.

They looked at 13,604 smokers that were studied between 2013 and 2015 and discovered that individuals who switched to vaping were more likely to relapse and take up smoking cigarettes again.

Pierce concluded:

“This is the first study to take a deep look at whether switching to a less harmful nicotine source can be maintained over time without relapsing to cigarette smoking, if switching to e-cigarettes was a viable way to quit cigarette smoking, then those who switched to e-cigarettes should have much lower relapse rates to cigarette smoking. We found no evidence of this.”