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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.
Still not gonna let you vape in a meeting though. It's your disgusting habit, not mine. Go away.
especially teenagers
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.
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.
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.