Vaping not a gateway to youth smoking—international studies

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International studies have found no evidence that vaping and the use of e-cigarettes and heated tobacco products (HTPs) serve as a gateway to youth smoking and nicotine addiction in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, France, Germany and Switzerland.

A 2021 study by Wayne Hall and Gary Chan on the “gateway” effect of e-cigarettes found that “e-cigarette use has not been accompanied by increased cigarette smoking among young people in the United States, as would be the case if e-cigarette use were a major gateway to cigarette smoking.”

Results of these studies are important in developing countries such as the Philippines which recently enacted into law Republic Act No. 11900 or the Vaporized Nicotine and Non-Nicotine Products Regulation Act that regulates the importation, manufacture, sale, packaging, distribution, use and communication of vaping products such as e-cigarettes and HTPs.

A similar study undertaken in 2020 by researchers led by Martin Jarvis from the University College London noted that among high school students in the US, “we found that, for the great majority of those with any substantial cigarette smoking history, cigarettes were the first tobacco product tried, prior to any use of e-cigarettes”.

“Clearly, for these students their use of cigarettes and the development of characteristic nicotine dependence must be attributed to cigarettes as the uptake product, rather than to e-cigarettes,” they said.

The authors said that at the population level, the National Youth Tobacco Survey 2017-2019 failed to provide evidence of e-cigarettes acting as a gateway to smoking in adolescents. “In summary, data from the NYTS survey do not provide support for claims of a new epidemic of nicotine addiction stemming from use of e-cigarettes, nor for concerns that declines in youth tobacco addiction stand to be reversed after years of progress,” the researchers said.

The US Food and Drug Administration, in issuing pre-market tobacco product authorization to a heated tobacco product, said that available data indicate that few non-tobacco users would be likely to choose to start using HTP, including the youth.

In the UK, Public Health England, the highest health authority in the country, said “latest survey results UK do not support the idea that vaping (or the use of e-cigarettes) is a gateway to smoking.”

Action on Smoking and Health (ASH)-United Kingdom, a staunch anti-smoking organization, cited the results of five large surveys of 11 to 16 year olds in the UK between 2015 and 2017 showing that “most young people who experiment with e-cigarettes did not become regular users.”

“Overall, there is no evidence that e-cigarettes have driven up smoking prevalence in this age group. In fact, smoking prevalence among young people has declined since e-cigarettes came onto the market,” ASH UK said.

A time–series analysis conducted by researchers led by Emma Beard between 2007 and 2018 in the UK showed that the increase in prevalence of e-cigarette use in England among the entire sample does not appear to have been associated with an increase in the uptake of smoking among young adults aged 16 to 24.

A 2022 study by University of Bristol researchers led by Lion Shahab said: “Based on the current balance of evidence, using triangulated data from recent population-level cross-contextual comparisons, individual-level genetic analyses and modelling, we do believe, however, that causal claims about a strong gateway effect from e-cigarettes to smoking are unlikely to hold, while it remains too early to preclude other smaller or opposing effects.”

In Australia, a 2020 study by Dr. Colin Mendelsohn and Wayne Hall said the evidence that vaping serves as a gateway to smoking is unconvincing. “Smoking more often precedes vaping than vice versa, regular vaping by never-smokers is rare and the association is more plausibly explained by a common liability model,” they said.

Among the most recent and comprehensive analysis of whether vaping causes smoking uptake was published by Australian authors led by Gary Chan from the University of Queensland.  The study concluded that there was little evidence of a gateway effect. If a gateway effect does exist, it is likely to be small, the study said.

In Japan, a major study of over 60,000 middle and high school students commissioned by the Japanese Ministry of Health found that the use of HTPs was extremely low and much lower than smoking cigarettes.

In Germany, the Federal Center for Health Education conducted a study among youth (ages 12 to 17) and young adults (ages 18 to 25) showing that only 0.1 percent of youth and 0.5 percent of young adults reported using HTPs during the past 30 days. These figures were much lower than 8.7 percent of youth and 32 percent of young adults who reported being current smokers. 

In Switzerland, a 2018 study conducted by the independent foundation Addiction Suisse found that regular use of HTPs among 14 and 15-year-old boys and girls was practically negligible, and essentially limited to cigarette smokers.  

In France, a 2020 study Sandra Chyderiotis and other researchers found no evidence of an increased risk of transitioning to daily smoking at 17 among ever-smokers who also experimented with e-cigarettes.

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