According to a new study by the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), non-smoking youth who use e-cigarettes, smokeless tobacco or tobacco water pipe are more likely to start smoking conventional cigarettes within a year, according to UCSF's news release on the study.

The study is based on a US representative sample taken from the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) study of 10,384 adolescents who said they’d never smoked. The respondents, ranging between 12 and 17 years of age, were interviewed from September 2013 to December 2014. The questionnaires focused on bidis, cigarettes, cigars, cigarillos, e-cigarettes, hookah, kreteks, pipes and smokeless tobacco.
The objective of the study, which is published in JAMA Pediatrics, was to estimate “the longitudinal association between noncigarette tobacco use and subsequent cigarette smoking initiation among US youth,” according to the abstract of the UCSF study.
The researchers reported that all forms of tobacco consumption, including smoking e-cigarettes, is associated with future smoking. Adolescents who use more than one product are more likely to smoke in the future, according to the study. Benjamin W. Chaffee, DDS, PhD, an assistant professor at the UCSF School of Dentistry, said: “We found that teens who experimented with tobacco in any form were at greater risk of future smoking.”
The study found that 469 adolescents (4.6 per cent) reported that they’d tried a cigarette a year later, and 219 (2.1 per cent) reported that they’d smoked a cigarette within the past 30 days. Furthermore, smoking occurred more often among adolescents who used e-cigarettes (19.1 per cent), hookah (18.3 per cent), non-cigarette combustible tobacco (19.2 per cent), or smokeless tobacco (18.8 per cent).
New alternative tobacco products could “undermine public health gains in combatting smoking,” the researchers said. Other studies have shown that almost 4 million middle and high school students consumed one or more tobacco product, and 1.8 million of the students consumed two or more products in 2016, according to the UCSF news release.