The proliferation of e-cigarettes has reversed the declining trend of tobacco use among adolescents, according to data from the Southern California Children’s Health Study (CHS).
“We used data that we’d collected over the past 20 years to understand how the patterns of tobacco use had changed over time and to determine the contribution of e-cigarettes to the overall pool of ‘tobacco users’,” Jessica L. Barrington-Trimis from University of Southern California, Los Angeles said.
“In our study, we found evidence that e-cigarettes are recruiting at least some youth who likely would never have smoked combustible cigarettes,” she said.
Recent studies have suggested a 15-fold increase in the use of e-cigarettes by adolescents between 2011 and 2015, a period that also saw a 40 per cent decline in current cigarette use.
Barrington-Trimis and colleagues tracked smoking patterns among adolescents between 1995 and 2014 and compared the rate of total e-cigarette or cigarette use in 2014 to the rate of cigarette use before e-cigarettes were available.
E-cigarettes are not used only by adolescents who would otherwise be smoking cigarettes
The prevalence of current smoking among high schoolers decreased between 1995 and 2014 in both 11th and 12th grades. For 12th graders, current smoking rates declined from 19.1 per cent in 1995 to 14.7 per cent in 2001 and to 7.8 per cent in 2014, according to the July 11 Pediatrics online report. However, the combined prevalence of current cigarette and/or e-cigarette use in 2014 was at least what it was 10 to 15 years ago, before e-cigarettes were available. Among those in grade 12, for example, the combined use of either product in 2014 was 13.7 per cent, similar to the prevalence of cigarette use in 2001 and nearly five percentage points higher than current cigarette use in 2004.
“This substantially increased combined prevalence of cigarette smoking or e-cigarette use in 2014, compared with smoking rates a decade earlier suggests that e-cigarettes are not used only by adolescents who would otherwise be smoking cigarettes,” the researchers note.
“Prevention efforts targeted at youths need to address both traditional tobacco product use and alternative tobacco product use,” Barrington-Trimis said.
“With the upcoming FDA Deeming regulations and additional legislation that is beginning to take hold across the nation raising the age of tobacco purchase (including e-cigarettes) to 21, we might see some changes to adolescent use of e-cigarettes and other tobacco products,” she said.