Electronic cigarettes helped 18,000 people quit smoking for good previous year, according to a study which suggests they are on course to save thousands of lives. And quitting is still the best health advice for the 9.6 million smokers in the UK.
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According to the 2015 America’s Health Rankings Report from the United Health Foundation, Louisiana presently ranks 46 out of 50 states for tobacco use, with almost a quarter of the state’s residents smoking.
The study provides evidence to support a positive association between the increased success rates of attempts to quit smoking and the increase in e-cigarette use in England.
And in the US, there’s disagreement on how strictly the Food and Drug Administration should regulate e-cigarettes. The Cochrane committee said there was no evidence of serious side-effects from e-cigarette use over a two-year period.
While they found no direct evidence that e-cigarettes prompted more people to make the decision to try and quit, the team did find that as more people used e-cigarettes, more people also successfully stopped smoking.
John Britton, the director of the UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies at the University of Nottingham, said the trend towards a decreasing use of smoking cessation services was likely to be down to a number of factors, including cuts to mass media campaigns and the move of stop smoking services into local authority control. This study shows the positive impact they’ve had on helping people give up the deadly addiction… The recipient of the award was a court-established and court-supervised smoking cessation program to benefit all Louisiana residents who smoked a cigarette before September 1, 1988. But this does not prove a causal link between the two.
“The challenge for public health is to embrace the potential of this new technology, and put it to full use”, he added.
One finding of the study may be of concern to the NHS and the officially sanctioned path to giving up smoking.
However, e-cigarette use in quit attempts was negatively associated with use of NRT on prescription, perhaps because patients using e-cigarettes having already tried NRT, explain the authors.
Another report on e-cigarettes in Britain, released at the same time, similarly concluded the devices may help smokers get the tobacco monkey off their backs.
Complicating the issue here is recent debate over e-cigarettes that use nicotine and which involve inhaling the nicotine vapour (called vaping).
In a separate scientific analysis also published on Tuesday, researchers at the Cochrane Review found that the overall weight of evidence on e-cigarettes suggests they can help people stop smoking and have no serious side-effects.
John Britton, from the University of Nottingham, said the significant year-on-year fall in smoking “indicates that something in United Kingdom tobacco control policy is working, and successful quitting through substitution with e-cigarettes is one likely major contributor”.
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The Cochrane Review is an independent, non-profit collaboration of researchers from more than 130 countries who work to produce “credible, accessible health information that is free from commercial sponsorship and other conflicts of interest”. “If you can’t stop smoking, if you can switch to another form of nicotine and that lets you stop smoking then that is great”.
