Using data from more than 53,000 people across Europe – with at least 1000 from each country – the study also found the proportion of people across Europe who consider e-cigarettes unsafe almost doubled to 51 per cent from 27 per cent.
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“A better understanding of the population-level use and impact of e-cigarettes within the European Union is needed, especially of the potential impact on smoke-free laws, smoking initiation and cessation”, they conclude.
Lead author Dr Filippos Filippidis from the School of Public Health at Imperial said: “This research shows e-cigarettes are becoming very popular across Europe – with more than one in ten people in Europe now having tried one of the devices”.
Researchers have found a significant association between marketing for e-cigarettes and product use among middle and high school students.
Earlier this month the Obama administration extended FDA oversight to all tobacco products, without exception, including e-cigarettes and sweet-flavored small cigars. There are no restrictions on the messaging they can use, and health warnings do not appear on e-cigarettes like they do on cigarette packages.
While more research must be done to prove a definitive link between e-cigarette advertising and its use, the researchers believe that their study has laid some of the groundwork for future studies.
Most of the people who had tried e-cigarettes were former or current smokers, though the number of people who had never smoked cigarettes, yet had tried e-cigarettes, had also increased from 2012 to 2014. “This raises the question of whether they could be a “gateway” to smoking conventional cigarettes”.
This poses a big barrier to their being able to be sold in a setting such as pharmacy, where users could be given information about the products and how to use them to quit smoking or reduce their tobacco use.
The proportion of people who said they had ever tried an e-cigarette rose from 7.2% in 2012 to 11.6% in 2014 across member states, although this figure varied widely by country, ranging from 5.7% of respondents in Portugal to 21.3% in France, for example. “By combining the two, smokers have a very good chance of success”.
“They can see the highly restricted nature of pharmaceutical products, so there would be probably less choice for them in terms of what products would be available”. It’s what they like.
She says that in the meantime, there remains a strong role for pharmacists in helping people quit smoking.
“People on antiretrovirals are another: there’s a high smoking rate among them and they’re at higher risk of tobacco-related diseases”.
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The attractiveness of e-cigarettes had no bearing on the decision to become a regular vaper, the responses showed. There’s a lot of uncertainty out there, but it seems pretty clear from data so far that they’re going to be less harmful than cigarettes. This could be keeping people smoking rather than switching to a much less harmful alternative. Mantey said this reveals a trend that is not likely to change.
