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E-Cigarettes Are Effective At Helping Smokers Quit, a Study Says (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: 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. 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.
I'm waiting for Apple's iCigarette to come out and make smoking cool again.
If all smokers switched to vape tomorrow, would there be a massive overall improvement in health? Of course there would be.
Still not gonna let you vape in a meeting though. It's your disgusting habit, not mine. Go away.
I speak from experience.
I smoked for over ten years and I quit, for good.
One day my 8 year old niece said to me : "Uncle, I don't want to see you die from lung cancer". And she meant it. A little girl making such a statement was quite powerful to me.
I quit smoking that week. For the first 3 weeks I had many urges to smoke a cigarette. I countered each and every one of those urges with a "NO, I am not going to smoke" thought. And I succeeded in not smoking. The first three weeks were the most difficult and after that the urge to smoke began to subside. Anyone who has the inner strength to make a decision and stick to it can quit smoking, and you don't need a patch or a vape-device or gum or any of the rest of that shit. All the "crutches" do is keep your body and brain conditioned to getting a dose of nicotine. I strongly believe the crutches will greatly increase the probability that a person won't quit smoking.
Everyone who smokes is in denial. It's not THEM who will get lung cancer, it's some other person. Well, that is utter bullshit.
If you have your priorities straight, smoking will look like a bad idea, period. And you CAN quit if you make a firm decision to quit.
That's all there is to it.
The ones who were giving up on their own?
What about the control group, how many of the regular smokers who were not told to give up actually gave up?
especially teenagers
That's deceptive. It's true that there's no evidence that it does cause it, but that's a single semi-rare disorder out of hundreds. From your OWN LINK - "If you’re a smoker, the best thing you can do for your health is to stop."
Which is obvious. What isn't obvious is the new and unstudied conditions, disorders and diseases that vaping every 15 minutes will cost this newest generation. DNA damage is sensitive AF. Smoking is bad, is vaping better? MAYBE.
It's not a slam dunk, it's a maybe. Vaping is still a net killer even when compared to tobacco, it still (no evidence because it's new, but) will fuck your shit up and kill you. There is a simple solution nobody follows - moderation.
Nobody follows it. No data exists that vapers moderate their shit any better than smokers.
Vaping is still a net killer even when compared to tobacco
No haha. The health problems of vaping are small compared to the problems of tobacco.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That was already disproven (including one of the researchers involved in the study actually condemning it) as the way they got those results was by taking a discontinued $3 4w ecig top (the kind you used to find in gas stations around 2012 which nobody has used in ages) and slapping it on a mech mod (something that on average costs over $100 and is used by the kind of hardcore vapers that would never use a $3 top) so they could pump over 80w into a 4w tank.
Did they detect formaldehyde? Sure when you pump 80w into a 4w device you are gonna detect all kinds of things as it literally melts, in fact several YouTubers tried to recreate the "experiment" but couldn't even get the device to hit as it was burning up too quick. BTW do you know who funded the study? Your good friends at RJ Reynolds.
But feel free to look up "ecig formaldehyde" on YouTube as you will find many trying to recreate the results and you can watch exactly what happens when you pump 80w+ into a 4w piece of plastic with a wire as small as a human hair, what comes out certainly isn't vapor. Luckily its pretty much physically impossible to do unless you use exotic hardware like a mech mod because all devices that have been made in the last 5 years or so have automatic detection of wattage so they simply will not let you run too much power into a low power tank, it just won't fire and will give you an error code.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Nope, just yet to be fully established due to the linear nature of time and the recent nature of vaping. You're an assumptive derivative moron. What you have working in your favor is the sub-5-year memory of most idiots, your base.
Even Trump understands sheep like you perfectly. It's no mystery.
E-Cigarettes are obsolete. F-Cigarettes and G-Cigarettes are already shipping. Get with the times or be outsourced to cheap hungry countries.
Table-ized A.I.
The headline should read, 18% of cigarette smokers switch to e-cigarettes. They don't actually stop smoking, or reduce their nicotine addictions.
Too many fucking racists on /. these days. Get the fuck out you robot-hating piece of shit Nazi puke.
False equivalence. Finding flaws in vaping doesn't mean it is equally dangerous to smoking tobacco. All studies are clear that vaping is less bad. The bar isn't zero harm, you suck in a lot of car exhaust commuting to work on a bicycle.
Metallo-Americans unite!
In other news, this story was posted today:
https://www.webmd.com/smoking-...
I haven't read further to see if they controlled for latent effects of prior smoking (which would presumably explain most of the increased risk for the subset of vapers who had switched from smoking to vaping), but researchers recently found that people who vape (but don't smoke) had a 71% higher risk of stroke, 59% higher risk of heart attack or angina, and 40 percent higher risk of heart disease.
The sample size is impressive: "The researchers included nearly 66,800 people who said they had ever regularly used e-cigarettes, comparing them with about 344,000 people who'd never tried the devices."
And they controlled for some major factors: "The increased health risks linked to e-cigarette use held strong even after Ndunda and his colleagues accounted for other potential risk factors, such as age, excess weight, diabetes and smoking."
But this study would be far more compelling if it compared people who vape but have not smoked to people who do neither. I hope you found it interesting anyway.
Exactly, my father never needed e-cigarettes to quit smoking!
https://ibb.co/mHCKB9
Buck: Hey, I stopped smoking cigarettes.
Cindy Russell: Oh, good.
Buck: Isn't that something? I'm on to cigars now. I'm on to a five-year plan. I eliminated cigarettes, then I go to cigars, then I go to pipes, then I go to chewing tobacco, then I'm on to that nicotine gum.
Pro-tip: Changing the method of nicotiene delivery does not mean you've eliminated your nicotiene intake.
You don't think that there's an industry behind meth, heroin and cocaine?... okay...
As my wife was instructed by a doc after several tries with patches: Following the instructions tapers you too fast - like by a factor of two to three. You get withdrawal and give up.
So she followed the doctor's instructions and went through more than one box of step one - until she wasn't feeling withdrawal symptoms - then went to step 2, etc. (There may have been a scheduling tweak in there, with partial overlap and staggered timing of two lower dose tabs to achieve an additional intermediate step.)
She's been smoke free now for several years.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
...is 35% owned by Altria, AKA Philip Morris, acquired for $13 billion late last year. Expect a lot more reporting of how wonderful vaping is from now on. Meanwhile, we have a vaping epidemic hitting schools. Are we going to do this all over again?
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
It's not the melting plastic tank, it's the well known fact that propylene glycol breaks down in to formaldehyde when heated.
Not just formaldehyde, but a whole bunch of different carbonyls.
Not as much as burning tobacco, but not insignificant either.
e-cigarettes are not as bad as real cigarettes, but they're still not good for you.
Later this year a lot of countries are planning on regulating vaping in a similar manor as tobacco.
New Zealand is banning their use inside public places (bars, restaurants, etc) like we did with smoking years ago. They're also restricting advertising and sale to minors too.
The FDA applies a lot of the same rules to ecigs as they do it regular cigrettes.
Who cares if it helps you break a nasty habit?
After losing both my father and mother to COPD from smoking in less than a year my youngest gifted me with an ecig kit, saying "We've had enough funerals in this family, I don't want to have to bury you too", that was 6 years ago and to this day I've been cigarette free which for a pack and a half a day smoker? Is saying something.
I still vape but I went from 20mg all the way down to 3mg and I feel a hell of a lot better. I don't get winded like I used to, I don't wake up every morning hacking my brains out, the closest thing I have to a "downside" these days is the wife using me as an air freshener, telling me something like "My SUV is kinda stuffy so you are driving...and bring the one that smells like blueberries" LOL. Hell of a lot nicer than that nasty dingy smell of old cigarette smoke.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
No one actually quits, they just switch from smoking to vaping. And sometimes back and forth as money permits (or doesn't).
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it! --Longbottle
Meth, heroin and cocaine are still completely illegal and you go to jail forever for addicting yourself to them. But since there's an industry behind nicotine, deceptively packaged and marketed and scientifically backed, well... profit away!
You're comparing nicotine with meth, heroin and cocaine? Those drugs are much more powerful and potentially harmful than nicotine. That is ostensibly why they are illegal (leaving aside the political reasons they are illegal), not because they are addictive. Caffeine is addictive too, but I don't see you comparing it to any of those drugs. And right fully so, because nicotine is more on the level with caffeine than any of those other drugs.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
It's not the melting plastic tank, it's the well known fact that propylene glycol breaks down in to formaldehyde when heated. Not just formaldehyde, but a whole bunch of different carbonyls. Not as much as burning tobacco, but not insignificant either.
e-cigarettes are not as bad as real cigarettes, but they're still not good for you.
Later this year a lot of countries are planning on regulating vaping in a similar manor as tobacco. New Zealand is banning their use inside public places (bars, restaurants, etc) like we did with smoking years ago. They're also restricting advertising and sale to minors too.
The FDA applies a lot of the same rules to ecigs as they do it regular cigrettes.
I don't think anyone is saying that e-cigarettes are harmless. But as you say they are much less harmful than tobacco cigarettes. That is the point, at least as far as helping people stop smoking.
I quit smoking 4 years ago with the help of a vaporizer. I feel much better now, can breathe more deeply, and perform better in my workouts. My lung capacity has improved noticeably, and I don't cough nearly as much as I used to. I will certainly not claim that vaping is the same as just breathing air. But my personal experience has shown me that it is much less harmful than cigarettes. The next step now is to quit the vaping too. But at least I have mitigated the harm in the meantime.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
PG is used in so many medical applications it âoebreaking downâ doesnâ(TM)t seem to be a problem in those applications. There may be some specific cases where this is an issue but Iâ(TM)d suspect it has more to do with the metal in the coil if it ever actually converts. There is certainly a lot of confusion in the market. I should also point out that most quality eliquid is going to have little or no PG in it, glycerine is the preferred carrier. The bigger concern is actually the coil material that heats the liquid. There is no regulation with the coil material and the coil breaking down due to temperature or chemical wear and tear (from some acidic flavorings) will actually make pitting in the coil, meaning those are being vaporized into heavy metals. Something like stainless steel is an ideal coil for not breaking down. Itâ(TM)s an industry that is young, so knowledge is powerful. With some proper advancements in legislation and technology much of the negative aspects can be minimized, making vape a much better nicotine delivery system for overall health than a burining amonia soaked leaf with flame control additives. Hard to say if it will make it as an industry.
Well, I suppose that a machine designed to have you inhale an addictive substance is marginally less stupid than "rolling leaves up and putting them in your mouth and setting them on fire" ...
A lot of these comments put in perspective the general mentality towards harm reduction in America. Many people are benefiting from using e-cigs to reduce the harm caused by nicotine products. People using them to manage a problem they have are being called gross and douchey. The 'Just Say No' mentality that worked so well for the D.A.R.E. generation is being applied here. Many Americans share the same sentiments when they speak on the opioid epidemic in America. Even knowing that opioids were being over-prescribed for most of the late 90's and early 2000's, there's still a huge number of Americans blaming the users, telling users to go cold turkey even knowing that could potentially prove fatal to opioid addicts, fighting methadone clinics and safe injection sites because property values, providing no reasonable alternative to handling an epidemic that is killing a record number of Americans. Harm reduction needs some real support in Congress if America is ever going to start conquering its real problems, and hopefully not in the same way that alcohol prohibition changed the cultural values that Americans held about alcohol. Just imagine, people used to drink whiskey with their breakfast in the 1800's.
twice as effective as conventional nicotine replacement products, like patches and gum, for quitting smoking.
Individual results may vary. Screw your p-values, pics of the empirical distribution or it didn't happen.
when it comes with it's own risks. Yes, it's useful for a smoker trying to quit, but from a health standpoint you really shouldn't be breathing something other than air on a regular basis...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It goes like this
Anti-smoking groups get a 'sin tax' on every pack of cigarettes purchased.
When smokers started switching to vapes, the sin tax revenues declined.
In California (2010, I think) the lost 'revenue' from sin taxes on cigarettes due to vaping was in the Billions of dollars.
That is when we saw the anti-smoking groups start attacking vaping
Their goal is to get similar sin taxes applied to vaping so as to continue their revenue stream
As effective as the anti-smoking campaigns have been, this is clear demonstration that linking financing of anti smoking groups to the continued use of cigarettes is a terribly bad idea, since they will be motivated to continue their own existence after cigarette smoking has ceased.
Unlike extreme consumers of microwave popcorn (yes really!), no vaper has ever been diagnosed with popcorn lung.
So by your logic, we should ban microwave popcorn?
Actually, no. Vaping is not smoking. Would you rather the teens vape or smoke? I ask because history has long proven that your preferred option of neither one just doesn't happen in the real world.
Nicotine has an addiction potential that is on par with those substances.
Caffeine and Nicotine are actually similar in that we use them at extremely low doses but they would outright kill you if you used them like meth, heroine, and cocaine.
Outside of Caffeine being extremely deadly it is actually quite similar to Cocaine and Meth. Neither cocaine or meth would approach the addiction potential or danger of caffeine if used in proportionally low doses and concentration. The danger with cocaine mostly came after it became restricted, smugglers started purifying it to extreme levels to make it more profitable and discovered that not only do relatively high doses not kill you but cocaine becomes more addictive both as you increase concentration and dosage.
Similarly back when meth was used as impure "speed" and snorted it wasn't really a problem outside of poor quality control in biker labs. It didn't become a real problem until it started being purified to high concentration and smoked. To the extent we've tested them the various uppers have a lot in common, both in terms of benefits and harm.
I'm not about to gamble with heroine just to test it but I doubt it is much different than other opiates at equivalent doses. If you've ever been in real pain you know the non-opiate medications have a minimal effect. I suspect an agenda is behind them beating placebo at all for reduction of pain beyond simple inflamation. Heroine was initially created to replace morphine for battlefield injuries so it was never really used in a low dose capacity. There are certainly stronger pain killers which have been made into "fake" lower strength pills such as Fentanyl. The issue there has again been quality control and safe handling, they mostly pass undetected replacements for mild pain killers like hydrocodone.
My concern with the coils is the ceramic materials being used and the particles those create. The effects of that kind of particulate is cumulative so it builds up over time in the lungs even at small doses.
"With some proper advancements in legislation and technology"
Seems unlikely, The government does a poor job of regulation so you'll have to pick one either the legislation advances along or the technology does but if the legislation advances it will almost certainly kill the advancement of the technology.
"What isn't obvious is the new and unstudied conditions, disorders and diseases that vaping every 15 minutes will cost this newest generation."
Maybe, maybe not. Any restaurant, cup of coffee, or any number of other food and candy products puts much of the same things into the air. The flavorings weren't invented for e-cigs, they borrowed FDA approved food additives. You don't just eat food you know, you also heat it and breath the exhaust.
Usually. I am concerned about the ceramic blanket material used rather than cotton in many vapes, the cotton itself which always burns, and the ceramics being used for heating elements.
In particular the ceramic components are concerning because the fine particles you'll inhale as a consequence are cumulative.
No, the studies have shown that it poses a reduced risk of the specific ailments that smoking burnt leaves does.
To make a claim that it's less dangerous over-all we need to wait for the curent generation of life-long-vapers to die so we can compare their life expectancy to their life-long-smoker and non-smoker-non-vaper counterparts.
Until then there's every possibility that it'll turn out vaping causes some horrible new condition we had no idea to even look for, or causes some existing condition (cancer) via a causal mechnism didn't think to look for.
It's highly probable that vaping is less dangerous than smoking (that isn't a high bar to clear), and entirely possible that it is less dangerous than any number of "harmless" activities like eating bananas or being exposed to sunlight. But the studies necessary to demonstrate that haven't been done because they require a lifetime of vaping to produce a data set usable for the study.
Until those studies are done, caution is wise. Smokers switching to vaping is reasonable, as is adults experimenting with vaping, presenting vaping as harmless and encouraging children/teens to start is irresponsible.
In particular the ceramic components are concerning because the fine particles you'll inhale as a consequence are cumulative
That is a reasonable concern. Tar is cumulative also.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
But it's neither a XOR and history also shows it's far more difficult to rid of addictions than to introduce them and a percentage of the population simply doesn't stand a chance against addictive substances.
Because really, the same point has been made about weed in het past just to find out addictive substances tend to get stronger to meet customers demands.
Ecigs are actually less addictive than cigarettes. Cigarettes include a MAO inhibitor that potentiates the addictive qualities of nicotine. And again, teens have been smoking in spite of school rules, parental prohibition and laws against selling to minors for decades. It's better they get into the less addictive and less harmful e-cigs.
As for weed, you do know it's not addictive, don't you?
You ex-smokers are the most annoying, self-righteous assholes out there.
Oh bullpussy! This dude here at work wears a patch WHILE he smokes. He'll chew nico gum too while wearing it. One thing he hasn't ever done? VAPE. This is why anecdotes aren't data.
I'll play along.
... well it shouldn't be there. I was a 30 a day smoker until early December 2018. I'm sucking so hard on a nicotine free e-cig these days begging for something to come out of it that I could probably make an excellent career as a male prostitute now.
I still have a pack of Marlboro on the dinner table that I tap into... more often than I should. And I have a pack in the car which
You're probably right that the massive decrease in smoking has been financially damaging to many people around the world. But companies and shareholders are two different things and there are too many people who don't get that.
You seem to think that there's some sort of major money making machine out there that if a company doesn't perform well, the owners are going to lose their asses and such. This could be medical research for cancer. It can be a tobacco company... pretty much any company capable of profiting from tobacco taxes.
This is not how it works.
The owners of the companies are the shareholders. The shareholders can generally move their investments from one company to another. If they want to get some extra cash from the company, they can force it to deplete its cash by paying dividends. They can even get the company to take a loan and use that money to pay dividends leaving the company bankrupt, in debt and ready to collapse, but it takes an amazing accountant to make that work cleanly.
Every company making money from big Tobacco is covered. The shareholders of those companies have already left the companies. They've moved onto whatever Forbes or Gartner is interested in these days. Instead, what's left is investors who specialize in profiting as companies shrink. There is such a thing. It's possible for the owners of a company to find ways to profit from writing off losses for example.
Let's say you're Emma Watson and you've had a great year and tax time is coming. One option for Hollywood actors in the past has been to buy into producing a film guaranteed to fail at the box office. This would let you take a loss in a possibly fun way. The alternative is to invest in a company that will lose money on a steady schedule so the loses can be written off. Creative accountants can find ways to make a million in losses come back as 10 million in non-taxable income or better.
So those companies are amazing targets for people in need of write-offs right now and there's a ton of money to be made that way.
To make a claim that it's less dangerous over-all we need to wait for the curent generation of life-long-vapers to die so we can compare their life expectancy to their life-long-smoker and non-smoker-non-vaper counterparts.
Moving the goalposts. There is no such requirement in scientific research.
It's highly probable that vaping is less dangerous than smoking (that isn't a high bar to clear),
It's not only probable, but it is confirmed by strong evidence.
Until those studies are done,
Which studies? We've studied propylene glycol before. There are multiple studies that have been peer reviewed and used in government safety programs for decades now. More data and more research is always a good idea, but to claim that you are waiting for the results of a new study while also ignoring old studies is a bit absurd. Why not ignore the new studies too? You make no damn sense.