E-cigarettes have benefits as a smoking cessation aid, according to a new study published by a team of researchers at MUSC Hollings Cancer Center, reports News-Medical.net.
The new study, the largest study of e-cigarettes in the US, showed that using e-cigarettes encourages people to quit smoking – even people who said they had no intention of quitting when they participated in the study. The findings were published in August in eClinical Medicine.
“This is not a panacea for smoking cessation,” said Matthew Carpenter, Ph.D., lead author of the study and co-leader of the Cancer Control Research Program at Hollings. Still, he was surprised that all the hypotheses tested in the study were confirmed. “It’s rarely the case that you’re proven correct for almost everything that you predicted. Here, it was one effect after another: No matter how we looked at it, those who got the e-cigarette product demonstrated greater abstinence and reduced harm as compared to those who didn’t get it,” he said.
Carpenter and his colleagues designed the study in a naturalistic way to mimic real-world conditions as much as possible – also a first for e-cigarette studies, the report said. “First off, we took smokers who did and did not want to quit. So right off the bat, not everybody wanted to quit. Secondly, we gave them very little instruction on how to use it,” he explained. Instead, participants were handed e-cigarettes and told they could use them or not, as much or as little as they wanted. A control group received nothing at all.
The study found that participants in the e-cigarette group were more likely to report giving up combustible cigarettes completely. They were also more likely to report that they had reduced the number of cigarettes per day they smoked and the number of times they tried to quit. The number of quit attempts is an important metric because people typically need several attempts before they are successful in quitting smoking.
The study included people from 11 cities in the US and spanned four years. At the start of the study, Carpenter wanted to take biochemical samples from participants in the Charleston area to check their self-reports of smoking behaviour. However, COVID interrupted this plan and made in-person sampling impossible. Although this was a disappointing aspect of the study, the participants’ self-report of smoking behaviour is still considered very reliable, he said.
The study will be another data point for the public health community and policymakers when it comes to how to deal with e-cigarettes. “No one wants e-cigarettes in the hands of kids, and we should do all we can to stop that. But we shouldn’t do so by denying this option for adult smokers who can’t otherwise quit,” Carpenter said. He pointed out that other countries are much more liberal about e-cigarette use than the US.