March 1, 2016

expert reaction to study of e-cigarettes and smoking cessation

E-cigarettes and their contribution to smoking prevalence is the subject of a paper published in the journal Addiction.

All our previous output on this subject can be seen here. The SMC also produced a Factsheet on e-cigarettes.

Prof. Linda Bauld, Professor of Health Policy at the University of Stirling, and Deputy Director of the UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies, said:

“This study provides valuable ‘real world’ evidence on electronic cigarettes and smoking cessation. From these data, it is clear that electronic cigarettes are appealing to smokers trying to stop and have helped a significant number of people in England to move away from tobacco, a product that kills one in two of its regular users. Reducing smoking not only prevents premature deaths but also saves the NHS money in terms of treating fewer smoking-related diseases such as cancer and heart conditions. E-cigarettes have also saved the public purse money in the short term, as they are not medicines but instead products which people choose to buy themselves. This ‘consumer revolution’, as it has been called, may well be saving lives.”

Prof. Peter Hajek, Director of the Tobacco Dependence Research Unit at Queen Mary University of London, said:

“These are important findings that deserve wide publicity. E-cigarettes have a potential to reduce smoking related morbidity and many smokers are successful in making the switch from smoking to vaping. Specialist smoking cessation services are currently not offering e-cigarettes and are seeing a marked decline in interest. This is unfortunate, as it is likely that even more smokers would switch to vaping successfully if e-cigarettes were combined with behavioural support that the services provide. Hopefully, findings like this will encourage the services to start offering e-cigarettes as a part of their overall toolkit.”

‘Estimating the population impact of e-cigarettes on smoking cessation in England’ by Robert West et al. will be published in Addiction on Tuesday 1 March. 

Declared interests

None declared