E-cigarette may help smokers quit, says study

Washington DC: Good news! Vaping is safer, as a study recently reveals that adults who use e-cigarettes daily were three times more likely to quit cigarettes compared to those who have never tried e-cigarettes.

Researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and the Rutgers School of Public Health found that over half of daily e-cigarette users had quit smoking in the past five years, compared to just 28 percent of adults who had never tried e-cigarettes.

The findings revealed that the probability of quitting cigarettes was three times higher among daily e-cigarette users compared to never e-cigarette users.

They analysed for participants' desire to quit smoking cigarettes and controlling for other factors known to predict quitting such as educational attainment, health insurance and age.

This is one of the first studies to reveal the patterns of cessation prevalence among e-cigarette users at a national level.

Lead author Daniel Giovenco at the Mailman School of Public Health said that the findings suggest that frequent e-cigarette use may play an important role in cessation or relapse prevention for some smokers.

They used data from the 2014 and 2015 National Health Interview Survey.

"Without knowing details about device attributes, user experiences and motivations for e-cigarette use, reasons for low cessation rates among infrequent e-cigarette users are unclear," stated the study's second author Cristine Delnevo from Rutgers School of Public Health.

The research appears online in the journal Addictive Behaviors.