Two recent analyses report that e-cigarettes are not effective in helping adults quit smoking despite being the most widely used product for smoking cessation-ahead of all FDA approved cessation aids combined, Medical Xpress reported.Karen Messer PhD, a senior author on both papers, said that results suggest that e-cigarette smokers “would have been just as successful in quitting smoking without the use of e-cigarettes.” She went on to say that without the use of e-cigarettes, smokers “would have been more successful in breaking their nicotine dependence.”
The two analyses were led by University of California San Diego school of medicine. Both studies used data from the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Heath (PATH) study, which enrolled a sample of 45,971 adults and youth, between 2013 and 2014, and re-interviews them annually.
One analysis, published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One, showed that while a quarter of those in the study used e-cigarettes to quit, the cessation rates among that group were no different from cessation rates among those not using e-cigarettes.
The second analysis, published in July of 2020 in the American Journal of Epidemiology, also found that there was no evidence that cessation rates of e-cigarette users were different than that of none users.It was also clear from this analysis that participants who quit smoking using e-cigarettes were less likely to be nicotine free at follow-up. This was primarily due to that fact that many of those who quit smoking cigarettes were still using e-cigarettes, which also contain nicotine.