Today’s Teen E-Cig Users May Be Tomorrow’s Smokers

Leventhal said his study “does little to dispel concerns that recreational e-cigarette use might be associated with moving on to these very harmful tobacco products”.

“Adolescents who enjoy the experience of inhaling nicotine via e-cigarettes could be more apt to experiment with other nicotine products, including smokeable tobacco”, said Adam M. Leventhal, Ph.D., associate professor and director of the Health, Emotion, & Addiction Laboratory at the Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and first author on the study.

If the students admitted to using e-cigarettes, they were more than twice as likely to report smoking cigarettes during the course of the study, while the likelihood more than tripled for taking up hookah and more than quadrupled for cigars.

However, the findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association stop short of showing that e-cigarettes cause teens to try other forms of tobacco, and scientists said more research is needed to explore any such link.

The data sparked alarm among tobacco control advocates who fear e-cigarettes will create a new generation of nicotine addicts who may eventually switch to conventional cigarettes.

Whether teens had tried just one e-cigarette or were habitual users isn’t known, nor is whether they became heavy smokers or just had a few puffs. The analysis focused on 2,530 students who initially reported never using combustible tobacco and underwent follow-up assessments after six and 12 months.

“Whether these same results would be found nationally or in other geographic regions is an empirical question”, she said. During the first six months after being surveyed, 30.7 percent of those who had used e-cigarettes started using combustible tobacco products, such as cigarettes, cigars, and hookahs, compared to only 8.1 percent of those who had never used e-cigarettes. The fact that e-cigarettes are sold in different flavors can be attractive to young people, the authors argue, and in some cases it remains easy for teens to get access to them due to a lack of regulation. She cited proposed regulations about marketing e-cigarettes to teens, including health warnings on packages of e-cigarettes and setting the legal age of purchase at 18 years. “In the meantime, to support future actions, researchers must seek to understand how to balance the benefits and risks of e-cigarettes and thereby to maximize public health and reduce the enormous toll of tobacco-related disease”.

“Addressing this issue of teen e-cigarette use is something that should happen”, he concluded.