Health experts said that although Global Positioning System and stop smoking services are not able to prescribe or recommend e-cigarettes as none of the products on the market are licensed for medicinal purposes, they hope the MHRA (Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) will do so soon.
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An worldwide review of published research by the Cochrane Review in December concluded that the devices could help smokers quit but said much of the existing evidence on e-cigarettes was thin.
“It just shows that [teenagers] who are attracted to e-cigarettes are the same people who are attracted to smoking”, added Hajek, one of the authors of the PEH study when speaking to The Guardian.
Adam Leventhal from University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and colleagues examined whether adolescents who reported ever using e-cigarettes were more likely to initiate the use of combustible tobacco (cigarettes, cigars, and hookah) during the subsequent year.
An estimated 2.6 million adults in Great Britain now use electronic cigarettes, according to Action on Smoking and Health (ASH). Additionally, less than one percent of adults and young people picked up smoking after an introduction to e-cigarettes. The message that we’ve heard from Public Health England today is simple: “vaping offers a healthier alternative”. 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.
E-cigarettes contain no tobacco.
There’s plenty of competing literature about the hot-button issue as vaping, or using e-cigarettes, has been growing in popularity across the globe. The study also suggested that e-cigarettes should be promoted as a device to assist people in quitting smoking.
PHE hopes its review will reduce the number of avoidable deaths, but despite growing evidence surrounding the safety of the e-devices, the report found that public distrust is increasing.
Should e-cigarettes be free?
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In England there was a decline in smoking over the last decades, however still there are more than eight million smokers.
