Vaping does not lead to smoking !

Introduction

Prof. Sandra Chyderiotis, an Inserm research engineer and graduate of Paris-Sud University, led a team of French researchers in a new study published in January 2020.

They analysed the role of e-cigarettes on 17-year-old daily cigarette smokers. They used retrospective data from a representative national survey conducted in 2017.

What’s the gateway effect ?

There’s a theory that e-cigarettes would encourage non-smokers, especially young people, to start smoking traditional cigarettes.

There’s no evidence to date that this phenomenon exists. But this theory and the precautionary principle associated with it are used by e-cigarettes critics to justify certain actions. The implementation of restrictive actions, among others.

The main argument is that vaping would promote and maintain nicotine addiction. By extension, it would make traditional cigarettes more attractive to young people. Young people who try e-cigarettes would, according to this theory, be more likely to start smoking than those who’ve never tried vaping. Let’s see what this study concludes.

What does this study say ?

This study is only part of a follow-up conducted by the OFDT (French Observatory on Drugs and Drug Addiction) in 2017. It concerned 39,115 17-year-old adolescents.
According to the figures :

• 34.1% of adolescents reported smoking at least 1 cigarette in the previous month and 25.1% smoked daily.
• 16.8% reported using an e-cigarette at least once in the previous month and 1.9% reported using it daily.

Among the 23,000 teens who had smoked at least 1 cigarette in their lives, those who had tried an e-cigarette were 38% less likely to become daily smokers than those who had never tried it.

The same results were found for those who had tried an e-cigarette before starting to smoke.
The researchers therefore concluded that there was no gateway effect in France.

The results could illustrate an ongoing denormalization of smoking. E-cigarettes could represent an alternative to tobacco smoking for a growing proportion of adolescents that, although they might experiment with both products, are losing interest in smoking. This hypothesis has already been mentioned by some specialists, such as Prof. Dautzenberg in the framework of the Paris Sans Tabac follow-up. Indeed, it could explain the impressive drop in teenage smoking in countries where vaping has developed in recent years. To be continued...

Conclusion

This study results show no increased risk of transitioning to daily smoking after experimenting with an e-cigarette. However, the authors stress the importance of conducting further studies with causal interference methods.

Thank you for reading.

The Sweetch Team