E-cigarettes do have value as a smoking cessation aid, according to a new study just released by researchers at MUSC Hollins Cancer Center in South Carolina, USA. It is understood that this new study is currently one of the largest e-cigarette trials in the United States, recruiting smokers from 11 cities in the United States, and the entire study lasted four years.
“While e-cigarettes are not a cure-all for smoking cessation, we were surprised to find that , all the hypotheses tested in the study were confirmed. The use of e-cigarettes helped participants to quit cigarettes – even if these participants had expressed no intention to quit smoking in advance.”
“In our trial, almost all of the hypotheses turned out to be correct, which is rare,” Carpenter said. “Regardless of how e-cigarettes are perceived by the outside world, those who had access to vaping products showed greater rates of quitting smoking and fewer health hazards than those who did not.”
Carpenter and his colleagues designed the experimental study in a more scientific and natural way, as close to real-world conditions as possible.
Carpenter said that previous studies demonstrating the effect of e-cigarettes on smoking cessation were very structured. These studies often recruited people who wanted to quit smoking as experimenters and provided them with detailed instructions on how to use e-cigarettes.
However, the situation in the real world is not so structured. People who do not want to quit smoking use e-cigarettes and finally achieve smoking cessation, so that it can be more convincing to prove the smoking cessation effect of e-cigarettes.
Therefore, in Carpenter’s study, smokers who want to quit smoking and those who do not want to quit smoking are recruited, and they will not be instructed too much on how to use e-cigarettes to observe the smoking cessation effect of e-cigarettes in real situations. The trial was divided into an e-cigarette group, which received e-cigarettes, and a control group, which received no e-cigarettes.
People in the vaping group were more likely to report quitting combustible cigarettes altogether, the study showed. They were also more likely to report that they reduced the number of cigarettes they smoked per day and the number of “quit attempts.” “Smoking cessation attempts are an important measure because it often takes multiple attempts for people to quit smoking successfully.”
The study involved people from 11 cities in the United States over a four-year period. The research will provide another data point for the public health community and policymakers to decide how to deal with vaping.
“Nobody wants kids to vape, and we should do everything we can to stop that from happening, but we shouldn’t deny vaping to adult smokers who want to quit,” Carpenter said.
