Today many adults are flitting with both cigarettes and vapig products. This may not be helpful in the long run. A New study published by the journal Tobacco Control suggests that smoking cigarettes while at the same time vaping will likely lead to a situation where the individual doing so will continue to use both products over the long term.
Many people trying to quit smoking believe that they could do so by slowly increasing their daily use of e-cigarettes while reducing their rate of smoking and gradually they will only be vaping and not smoking at all. the problem is that once you begin to smoke and vape it becomes almost impossible to give up any of the two habits. This makes it impossible for vaping to help people quit smoking.
Studies suggest that dual smoking and vaping are becoming quite common these days. However, using these two tobacco products at the same time can be quite harmful. However, more studies are required to map how individuals use these products and how the use patterns of the two products can affect the users.
In the study published online by the journal Tobacco Control, researchers took a sample of 545 dual vape and cigarette users from the US Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) Study. The samples were drawn in five groups based on waves (year) from 2013/2014 up to 2018/2019.
To qualify the participants had to be dual users of both vapes and cigarettes. The current vape was defined as someone who was vaping regularly (using e-cigarettes either daily or somedays). A current smoker on the other hand was someone who had smoked over 100 cigarettes in their lifetime and smoked cigarettes either daily or on somedays. Anyone who met these two-definition qualified for the study.
The researchers then studied the background demographic details of each participant such as the educational background, race or ethnicity, and information on behavioural factors such as frequency of cannabis and alcohol use and their thoughts on which was more harmful, cigarettes or vapes?
The participant’s behaviour regarding vaping and smoking was then traced back over four successive PATH Study Waves( years). At wave one 76% of the participants smoked every day, 33.5% used e-cigarettes every day, 62.5% used alcohol and 25% used cannabis. 81.5% believed that vaping was less dangerous to their health when compared to smoking cigarettes.
By tracing the behaviour of the participants the study reveals that vaping dropped to the lowest by wave 4 reaching 35% but rose to 41% by end of wave 5. Smoking also fell steadily dropping to 68% by end of wave 5.
Over the six years of the study, three patterns emerged. Off all the people who were using both vaping products and smoking cigarettes at the same time, the largest group (42%) quit vaping early in the study and continued to smoke throughout the study. Another group (15%) continued to smoke and vape at the same rate throughout the study period. And a small fraction (10%) quit both vaping and smoking early.
Research showed that the frequency of smoking, vaping or using other drugs played a major role in quitting. Those who used these drugs less frequently were more likely to quit than the heavy users. In addition, cutting on smoking helped individual users either quit or switch to vaping entirely. In conclusion, this study showered that before 2019, vaping did not play a major role in helping individuals quit smoking at the population level.
