Local Community Advertising
Seeing someone use an e-cigarette can give others the urge to smoke, according to a new study.
This desire is just as powerful when you watch someone vape as when you watch someone smoke an actual cigarette.
The study, published Jan. 12th, 2017, in Nicotine & Tobacco Research, found that young adult smokers exposed to the use of traditional cigarettes, first-generation e-cigarettes or second generation vape pens experienced an immediate, significant and lasting increase in the desire to smoke.
"The new e-cigarettes, known as vape pens, are now larger and more powerful devices," said study director Andrea King, from the University of Chicago. "They have low resemblance to cigarettes, so some people were hoping they might not produce the same urge to smoke."
"But we found that they do stimulate the urge," she said. “Their impact is roughly equal to watching someone light up a cigarette. They made the young adults in our study want to smoke."
E-cigarettes entered the U.S. market in 2007. Vape pens are more recent. Despite initial hopes that e-cigarettes, and now vape pens, could help smokers break away from tobacco, studies have not confirmed that.
In 2015, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control's National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) found that about 15% of current cigarette smokers and about 25% of former cigarette smokers were regular e-cigarette users.
King and colleagues designed an experiment to test the vape pen's effects on the urge to smoke in young adults, men and women aged 18 to 35, a highly susceptible group.
On average, they smoked 8.7 cigarettes a day on six to seven days each week. More than 80% had used e-cigarettes and almost 30% had used one in the past month.
The volunteers conversed with a member of the research team who pretended to be a fellow volunteer "randomly assigned" to consume different products as study tasks.
During these interactions, the pretending volunteer smoked either a cigarette or a vape pen. Both cues increased desire among research subjects for a cigarette or an e-cigarette.
"Our study focused on a classical Pavlovian trigger, as seeing someone smoke is a known potent cue that can induce others to smoke,” said King. “We did not expect that the vape pen would be as potent a cue as the regular cigarette, but it was as potent.
"The sight of someone using a vape pen bumps up the urge to smoke, so this may play a role in dual use of cigarettes and e-cigarettes, but future studies are needed."
Local Community Advertising