Health & body · 2020
Among teens who had smoked, was trying e-cigarettes linked to daily smoking?
In a French survey, 17-year-old ever-smokers who had tried e-cigarettes were less likely to report daily cigarette smoking than those who had not. The study found no evidence of an increased risk, but did not establish a causal effect.
Details
Multiple studies have linked adolescent e-cigarette use to later initiation of cigarette smoking, but little is known about its effect on the transition from starting smoking to smoking daily.
Researchers used retrospective data from a nationally representative French survey collected in 2017 (n = 39,115) to examine the role of ever using e-cigarettes in daily cigarette smoking at age 17 among adolescents who had ever smoked (n = 21,401). They calculated (RRs) using modified Poisson regressions with inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW).
Among French adolescents aged 17, 16.8% reported current e-cigarette use, including 1.9% who reported daily use; 34.1% reported cigarette smoking, including 25.1% who reported daily smoking.
Among ever-smokers, those who had ever used e-cigarettes were less likely than those who had not to transition to daily smoking at 17 (RR = 0.62, 95% CI [0.60–0.64]). A similar result was found among those who tried e-cigarettes before starting cigarette smoking (RR = 0.76, 95% CI [0.66–0.89]).
The researchers found no evidence of an increased risk of transitioning to daily smoking at 17 among ever-smokers who had also experimented with e-cigarettes. They called for further studies using causal inference methods to investigate the longer-term role of vaping in future smoking habits.
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