{"id":5630,"date":"2015-09-08T11:09:10","date_gmt":"2015-09-08T15:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/?p=5630"},"modified":"2015-09-30T12:46:11","modified_gmt":"2015-09-30T16:46:11","slug":"e-cigarettes-serve-as-gateway-to-smoking-for-teens-and-young-adults-dartmouth-and-pitt-collaboration-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/2015\/e-cigarettes-serve-as-gateway-to-smoking-for-teens-and-young-adults-dartmouth-and-pitt-collaboration-finds\/","title":{"rendered":"E-Cigarettes Serve as Gateway to Smoking for Teens and Young Adults, Dartmouth and Pitt Collaboration Finds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Young people across the United States who smoke electronic cigarettes are considerably more likely to start smoking traditional cigarettes within a year than their peers who do not smoke e-cigarettes, according to an analysis led by the University of Pittsburgh Center for Research on Media, Technology, and Health<\/a> (CRMTH) and the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Norris Cotton Cancer Center<\/a>. The study, funded by the National Cancer Institute<\/a> (NCI), was the first to assess this relation in a national U.S. sample of youth, and to include people older than 18 among its participants.<\/p>\n

The results, published online today and scheduled for the November print issue of JAMA Pediatrics<\/a>, are particularly timely as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration<\/a> considers how to regulate e-cigarettes, which are easier for adolescents to purchase and, in many respects, more attractive to young people than traditional cigarettes.<\/p>\n

\u201cE-cigarettes are not subject to many laws that regulate traditional cigarettes, such as age limits on sales, taxation and labeling requirements. They also come in youth-oriented flavorings that laws have limited in traditional cigarettes, such as apple bubble gum and chocolate candy cane,\u201d said lead author Brian A. Primack, MD, PhD<\/a>, director of CRMTH and assistant vice chancellor for health and society in Pitt\u2019s Schools of the Health Sciences<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"James
James Sargent, MD<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

James D. Sargent, MD, professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth\u2019s Geisel School of Medicine<\/a> and senior author on the study, adds that \u201cIt also is notable that electronic cigarettes are marketed on television. This represents the first time in more than 40 years that a smoking-related device has been advertised on this medium, which has tremendous reach and could drive appeal of these products among youth.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the current publication, the research team analyzed data on a national sample of nearly 700 16- to 26-year-old nonsmokers surveyed in 2012 and again in 2013 through the Dartmouth Media, Advertising, and Health Study. All participants were considered \u201cnon-susceptible\u201d to initiating traditional cigarette smoking at the beginning of the study, because they had\u00a0 responded \u201cdefinitely no\u201d when asked if they would try a cigarette offered by a friend or believed they would smoke a cigarette within the next year.<\/p>\n

By the next year, 38 percent of the baseline e-cigarette users had initiated traditional cigarette smoking. In comparison, only 10 percent of the youths who were not baseline e-cigarette users started smoking traditional cigarettes.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese differences remained statistically significant and robust even when we controlled for multiple known risk factors for initiating cigarette smoking, such as age, sex, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, sensation seeking, parental smoking and friend smoking,\u201d Dr. Primack said.<\/p>\n

In the manuscript, Drs. Primack and Sargent, and their team, theorize why e-cigarette smoking may serve as a gateway to traditional cigarette smoking, including:<\/p>\n