{"id":9579,"date":"2018-03-15T15:53:16","date_gmt":"2018-03-15T19:53:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/?p=9579"},"modified":"2018-07-24T10:22:27","modified_gmt":"2018-07-24T14:22:27","slug":"e-cigarettes-may-be-more-harmful-than-beneficial-according-to-evidence-based-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/2018\/e-cigarettes-may-be-more-harmful-than-beneficial-according-to-evidence-based-research\/","title":{"rendered":"E-Cigarettes May Be More Harmful Than Beneficial According to Evidence-Based Research"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Source: Shutterstock<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) industry is rapidly growing in the United States and the use of e-cigarettes is controversial.\u00a0 The controversy persists because researchers do not yet know if e-cigarette use results in more benefit than harm at the population level.\u00a0 New research from Dartmouth\u2019s Norris Cotton Cancer Center, in collaboration with Moores Cancer Center at UCSD, UCSF School of Nursing, and University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, quantifies the balance of harms and benefits using the most current scientific evidence.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlthough the tobacco industry markets e-cigarettes as a tool to help adult smokers quit smoking, e-cigarette use actually only marginally increases the number of adult cigarette smokers who are able to successfully quit,\u201d says principle investigator Samir Soneji, PhD, Associate Professor at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. \u201cOn the other hand, e-cigarettes may facilitate cigarette smoking initiation and confer substantial harm to adolescents and young adults once they are introduced to nicotine.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Samir Soneji,PhD (Photo: Mark Washburn)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Utilizing census counts, national health and tobacco use surveys, and published literature, Soneji\u2019s team calculated the expected years of life gained or lost from the impact of e-cigarette use on smoking cessation among current smokers, and transition to long-term cigarette smoking among never-smokers. \u201cE-cigarettes could lead to more than 1.5 million years of life lost because their use could substantially increase the number of adolescents and young adults who eventually become cigarette smokers,\u201d says Soneji. The results of their research, \u201cQuantifying Population-Level Health Benefits and Harms of E-Cigarette Use in the United States<\/a>\u201d are newly published in PLOS ONE<\/a><\/i><\/em>.<\/p>\n

Results find that based on the existing scientific evidence related to e-cigarettes and optimistic assumptions about the relative harm of e-cigarette use compared to cigarette smoking, e-cigarette use currently represents more population-level harm than benefit.\u00a0 While tobacco control efforts have successfully led to a substantial reduction in youth cigarette smoking since the 1990s, e-cigarettes have the potential to slow or even reverse that trend.<\/p>\n

Effective national, state, and local efforts are needed to reduce e-cigarette use among youth and young adults if e-cigarettes are to confer a net population-level benefit in the future. \u201cE-cigarettes will likely cause more public health harm than public health benefit unless ways can be found to substantially decrease the number of adolescents and young adults who vape and increase the number of smokers who use e-cigarettes to successfully quit smoking,\u201d says Soneji. \u201cWe also need to close the regulatory gaps that make e-cigarettes appealing to adolescents and young adults by reducing the availability of kid-friendly flavors (e.g., fruit-flavored e-cigarettes) and issuing product standards that reduce the level of known toxins and carcinogens in e-juice.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Samir S. Soneji, PhD<\/em>, is an Associate Professor at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, Geisel School of Medicine, Dartmouth College. He is also a member of the Cancer Control Program at Dartmouth\u2019s Norris Cotton Cancer Center. His research interests include the value of cancer care, tobacco regulatory control, and cancer screening, and focus on developing and applying innovative and quantitative methods to questions in tobacco control and cancer screening.<\/p>\n

This study was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health.<\/p>\n

###<\/b><\/strong><\/p>\n

Author:\u00a0Lara Stahler<\/p>\n

About Norris Cotton Cancer Center at Dartmouth-Hitchcock<\/b><\/strong><\/h2>\n

Norris Cotton Cancer Center combines advanced cancer research at Dartmouth\u2019s Geisel School of Medicine with patient-centered cancer care provided at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, NH, at Dartmouth-Hitchcock regional locations in Manchester, Nashua and Keene, NH, and St. Johnsbury, VT, and at partner hospitals throughout New Hampshire and Vermont. It is one of 49 centers nationwide to earn the National Cancer Institute\u2019s \u201cComprehensive Cancer Center\u201d designation. Learn more about Norris Cotton Cancer Center research, programs, and clinical trials online at cancer.dartmouth.edu.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dartmouth study finds e-cigarette use could do more harm than good by substantially increasing the number of adolescents and young adults who eventually become cigarette smokers and marginally decreasing the number of adult cigarette smokers who quit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":9580,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,182,8],"tags":[104,258,847,176,141,699],"class_list":["post-9579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-press-release-news","category-research","tag-addiction","tag-e-cigarettes","tag-home-feature","tag-nccc","tag-samir-soneji","tag-smoking-cessation","author-15"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2018\/03\/e-cig-shutterstock_140876200.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4r3h1-2uv","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9579"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10369,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9579\/revisions\/10369"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}