Smokers who quit traditional cigarettes and switch to e-cigarettes are more likely to then relapse and start smoking again, according to a new US scientific study.
Research shows that smokers who become smokers are less likely to successfully quit a traditional cigarette than those who do. Also, smokers who switch to e-cigarettes are more likely to start smoking again than those who quit smoking and switch to cigars or pipes.
The common perception is that those smokers who are unable to quit smoking completely will benefit to some extent if they at least fully switch to e-cigarette vaporization and thus do not smoke again. However, new research has found that the use of electronic cigarettes - even in everyday use - does not help vaporizers to stay completely away from the conventional cigarette.
According to the survey, only 42% of smokers who became vaporizers did not smoke at all after one year. Researchers at the University of California-San Diego School of Public Health, led by Professor John Pierce, who published the paper in the American medical journal JAMA Network Open, analyzed long-term data on 13.600 smokers. Of these, 9,4% quit smoking and then, of these former smokers, 63% remained "non-smokers", while the remaining 37% turned to other tobacco products (most, 23%, to e-cigarettes) .
The study focused on whether former traditional smokers who had become vaporizers or users of similar tobacco products were more or less likely to "relapse" and resume traditional smoking than those who had completely stopped smoking and vaporizing.
According to Pierce, "Our findings show that people who quit smoking and turned to e-cigarettes or other products actually had an 8,5% increased risk of re-smoking within the next year, compared with those who had stopped using all tobacco products. "Quitting is the most important thing a smoker can do to improve his health, but the evidence shows that switching to e-cigarettes makes it less and no more likely that one will eventually give up cigarettes."
"This is the first study to examine in depth whether switching to a less harmful source of nicotine, such as the e-cigarette, can in the long run prevent someone from starting to smoke again. If switching to e-cigarettes was indeed a viable way to quit smoking, then those who turned to e-cigarettes should have lower rates of relapse into cigarette smoking. However, we did not find any indication of such a thing ", he added.
Pierce stressed that "quitting smoking is one of the most difficult things one can do because of nicotine addiction. "Research shows that smokers do better when they quit nicotine altogether than when they switch to another nicotine source, such as the e-cigarette."
Previous research has shown that about one in four smokers turn to e-cigarettes in the hope that this will help them quit smoking altogether.