More science less smoking

March 20, 2019

according to another recent study in which smokers who switched to vaping eLiquids were much more likely to quit than people who used nicotine patches, gum or similar products.

As we know by now, the short term science seems to be settled, vaping eLiquids are considered far less hazardous than combustible cigarettes.  Yet here in America our health officials tend to worry about their allure for young people, because won't somebody please think of the children!  British health officials smartly look more favorably upon them as successful alternatives to quitting smoking.

"We know that there are millions of smokers out there who successfully stopped smoking by switching to vaping," says Peter Hajek, a public health researcher at Queen Mary University of London. Now UK doctors who want to recommend vaping as a way to stop smoking have a strong base to make that decision on a recent randomized study.

Hajek and his colleagues enrolled nearly 900 people who wanted to quit smoking in this test. Half randomly got e-cigarettes, and the other half got traditional treatment consisting of; nicotine patches plus gum, lozenges, nicotine inhalers or whatever kind of oral nicotine they preferred.

As he and his colleagues reported on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, about 10% of people with standard treatment quit smoking for at least a year, while 18% of the people given e-cigarettes had quit entirely.

"The figure may sound low, but these type of clients would, if they were quitting on their own, the quit rate would be about 3 percent," Hayek says. While vaping is not as effective as quitting cold turkey, it is certainly a viable pathway to eliminating both habits successfully. 

People who use vaping to quit smoking have milder cravings, he says. They also get pleasure from the act of vaping, which may contribute to its success as a tobacco-quitting aid. Additionally over time, many people gradually reduce the dose of nicotine they are receiving through these devices, Hajek says, so that makes it easier for people who want to quit vaping as well.

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